In his mind’s eye, as he ran, he saw the car braking, the examination of the sleeping scooterist, the reviving and questioning of the peasant. In that way he kept a sort of theoretical clock on the progress of developments behind him against which he could continuously measure his chances of reaching the coast before the pursuit turned their car around—in itself a substantially time-consuming maneuver on that narrow road— and set off to overtake him. And his spirits rose with every stride as his glimpses of the sea came closer and the picture in his mind was still not frantically ominous. Even in his athletic prime he would have had to leave the four-minute mile to the specialists, but on a downhill course and under the spur of life preservation he thought he could come close. And on the highway there would be buses and trucks, and beside it the coastal railway as well … Every run of bad cards must have a break, however brief, as every gambler knows; and as the Saint reached the main road at last, and his visualization of the most imminent menace still had the warriors up the hill only now looking for a place to turn their oversize chariot, it seemed to him that his turn was veritably setting in.
