Another glance. He was still there. My speedometer hovered around fifty.
Not to be outdone I twisted Lizzie's right handlebar grip as far as it would go, and like a bolt from the blue we darted ahead. Fifty-five, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-five. The wind was simply screeching in my ears.
Another glance back, our friend was slowly losing distance. A minute or two more and he was fast dwindling behind. In ten miles he was almost back on the horizon.
I had visions of breakfast in "Hagerstown," the next town of importance not so very far ahead. And so I forgot our friend of the Buick. In ten minutes' time I came to a village. As usual the good surface of the highway stopped and the roads through the town turned from the perfect concrete to an infernal hotch-potch of holes, gullies, ruts and mounds. Ironical notice boards warned the traveller that he must reduce his speed to fifteen miles per hour. It was purgatory even to go at four! To plunge into a seething mass of soil-waves at speed is disconcerting. It annoys you. But it is a custom that grows on you in Eastern America. You flounder about from side to side; you take a hop, skip and a jump here, there and everywhere; your very bones are shaken in their sockets; your temper approaches a frenzy of despair; and your language!
Time was when I would blush with shame at the sound of a word that was bad. Then a war came along and I learnt to experience the soothing charm of an occasional flow of language. Occasionally I met a sergeant-major who could swear freely for five minutes without even repeating himself!
And then I motor-cycled across the States. And my heart rejoiced within me that I had received such an excellent education. I found that with very little provocation or practice I could, had I the desire, have graduated to a very much higher stage of perfection in the United States than with the British Army in France. Indeed I will go so far as to aver that when ultimately I reached San Francisco not only could I have put to shame the most cultured sergeant-major that ever drilled recruits on a square, but in his moments of greatest enlightenment his powers of speech would have appeared as the futile prattle of childhood compared to what I could have taught him.
So that is why I slowed down when I got to "Victorville."
In a few minutes, who should come alongside but our friend with the Buick racer. He slowed down and put up his hand. "Mind stopping here a minute?" he asked.
"Not at all," I replied, thinking he wanted to ask the way or borrow a sparking plug—or maybe beg a match.