Well, that was just the sort of thing she was used to. And to-night there was need for haste. Great haste, thought the girl anxiously, as she remembered the look on her father's face when she and the storekeeper's wife had gotten him into bed.
"I'll have the roads all to myself; that's one good thing."
She settled herself in her seat, preparing for a tense hour. She, too, had marked the time; it had been on the verge of twenty minutes after eight as she left the store. "What right has the only doctor in the country to play chess, anyway? And with old Hell-Fire Packard at that? Two precious old rascals they are, I'll be bound. But a rascal of a doctor is better than no doctor at all, and— Ah, a good, open bit of road!"
The car leaped to fresh speed under her. She glanced at her speedometer; the needle was wavering between twenty-seven and thirty miles. She narrowed her eyes upon the road; it invited; she shoved the throttle on her wheel a little further open; thirty miles, thirty-three, thirty-five—forty, forty-five—there she kept it for a moment—only a moment it seemed to her breathless impatience. For next came a series of curves where her road, rising, went over the first ridge of hills and where on either hand danger lurked.
Beyond the ridge the road straightened out suddenly. Better time now: twenty-five miles, thirty, thirty-five—and then, down in the valley, forty-five miles, fifty, fifty-five—her horn blaring, sending far and wide its defiant, warning echoes, her headlights flashing across trees, fences, patches of brush, and rolling hills—sixty miles.
"If my tires only stick it out—they ought to—this road hasn't a sharp rock on it."
But from sixty miles she must pull down sharply. Far ahead something was across the road; perhaps only a shadow, perhaps a tangible barrier; she didn't know these roads any too well.
She cut off her power, jammed on foot and emergency brakes, and so came to a stop just in time. Here a fence stretched across the road; the tall gate throwing its black shadows on the white moonlit soil was not five feet from her hood when she stopped.
She jumped down, threw the gate wide open, propped it back with a stone knowing full well how the farmers and cattlemen hereabouts builded their gates to shut automatically, drove through in such haste that she grazed the gate itself and so jarred it into closing behind her, and was again glancing from road to speedometer—twenty-five, thirty-five, a turn to negotiate, seen far ahead, dropping back to twenty-five, to twenty. A straight, alluring stretch—twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-two, sixty-three—the far rim of the valley, another line of hills black under the stars—fifty again and down to twenty-five, to twenty and horn blowing as she sped into the mouth of the first cañon.
And again, when at last she was down in Old Man Packard's valley and within hailing distance of his misshapen monster of a house, she set her horn to blaring like the martial trumpet of an invading army. Cattle and horses along her road awoke from their dozing in the moonlight, perhaps leaped to the conclusion that it was old Hell-Fire himself in their midst, flung their tails aloft and scampered to right and left, and Terry's car stood in front of Packard's door.