“Prevention is better than cure, as you reminded me a while ago,” said George with a grin. He looked back along the road again. “By gum!” he cried, “it’s coming at a spanking pace. It must be a racer. Better be on the safe side. I’ll drive; you keep your eye on it. You may be able to see the colour of it when we come to a curve.”
They exchanged places. George immediately increased the speed to forty miles. At that rate he dashed through the village of Mantenay, outstripping a train that was running along the line. Farm labourers trudging home from the fields pressed into the hedges to avoid the car, and at St. Julien, a mile and a half further, George narrowly escaped dashing into a flock of geese, which waddled off into the village pond uttering shrill cries of alarm.
“Better be careful,” said Maurice.
“Oh, geese don’t matter. I killed one near Caudebec at Easter, and the owner came up in great excitement with a gendarme. But the gendarme only shrugged his shoulders and said, as near as I could make out, ‘It is forbidden to pasture geese by the roadside.’”
Maurice smiled.
“Pasturing geese is distinctly good,” he said. Again the road was quite level.
“It is still gaining, very rapidly now,” said Maurice, who caught fleeting glimpses of the motor through rifts in the cloud of dust. “And it is green as grass!”
“Well, I hope the Count likes our dust,” said George. “He must be getting his fill of it. We’ll go a little faster.”
He advanced the speed-lever, and increased the pace to fifty, and finally sixty miles an hour, at which rate the car dashed through Javat. The horse attached to a market-wagon there took fright, and galloped into a by-road only just in time to avoid a collision. The kilometre stones flashed by at two a minute. A sign-post with a staring warning, “Allure modérée,” at the entrance to Montrevel, forced George to reduce his speed to fifteen kilometres; but since this applied equally to the pursuing motor he did not care a rap for that, as he said. By the time they reached Bourg there was no sign of the motor, but when they had run up the narrow wooded valley of Alberine beyond Ambérieu, Maurice, looking back, descried the pursuer rushing along at a reckless speed, its dust trailing behind like the smoke of a steam-engine.
“They’ll lose up-hill,” said George. “We have the better of them there. But it’s lucky the road is dry and pretty straight. If it were wet I should have to slow down to avoid skidding.”