"There'll be a wet course," Rupert's muffled tones came from the opposite end of the room.
"Well?" Gerard queried lazily. "What of it?"
There was no answer. Instead sounded the click of moving throttle and spark, and the place burst into thunderous tumult; violet flames darted from the exhausts and enfolded the hood of the vibrating car as it moved forward to its master's side.
"I don't like this morning, and I don't like this course," stated Rupert, sombrely definite, through the roar and rattle of irregular reports from the cut-down motor. "But I guess I've got to stand for them. Anyhow, I couldn't have a classier Friday-the-thirteenth emotion equipment if I had been to a voodoo fortune teller who had a grudge against me. What are we waiting for?"
Gerard lingered in taking his seat, his amazed eyes travelling over the small, discontented dark face of his companion.
"Something's wrong, Rupert?"
"I ain't saying so—yet."
The driver's own expression shadowed slightly; he looked again and more searchingly at the other. In common with most men who had lived in the tense atmosphere of the most dangerous form of racing yet evolved, he had witnessed more than one case where a presentiment did not fail of fulfilment. Irrespective of whether catalogued as coincidence, occult foresight or absurdity, the facts did exist, occasionally to be read in the prosaic columns of a newspaper, more often lost except in camp annals. He knew, and Rupert knew, of a mechanician who suddenly refused absolutely to go out with the driver by whose side he had ridden countless miles, having no better reason than a disinclination for the trip. And they both had seen the substitute who took his place brought in dead, an hour later, after his car's wreck. A widely-known victor of many races, one of Gerard's close friends, had come to shake hands with him in a state of causeless nervousness that would have shamed a novice, just before starting on the ride from which he never returned. The price of debate is too high to argue with some things; Gerard temporized.
"I don't want to take you out feeling like that. Give yourself a day off," he suggested. "I'll find one of the factory men to go out with me for the morning's practice."
"Who's crazy now?" inquired his mechanician acidly, and flung himself back in his narrow seat.