"You'd get lost again."
"No, no, it's a straight road. I looked it up once. You follow the railroad. Look here," he added in great excitement, "the thing can be done without a grain of doubt. Here it is a little past eleven. We can certainly average twenty-five miles an hour. That means that we can be there a little after one. Fortunately, the Club is but a little ways out of our course, over in West Kensington."
"I'm game for it," said Frank, "but just the same, I don't like the idea of your going off with a machine and no license. You'll get jugged for sure if anything goes wrong."
"Nothing's going wrong. I got you into this trouble and I'm going to get you out somehow. Climb in and hold onto your headgear, we are only going to hit the high places." He shot away from the station and swung into the great north road, sign-marked "London," with the motor humming to the quickened pace.
"Nothing to it, Frank," boasted the confident chauffeur. "This is the way they all should have come up, plenty of ozone and action, no stuffy cars. We may even beat them to the club if we have luck," and he pushed the gas lever a few notches higher, and neatly dodged a dog curled up in the sand of the road.
Now that he was headed for London, even Frank's spirits rose. What seemed no chance half an hour ago had been transformed into a possibility. Well he knew that Gleason was exceeding the speed limit, but the time was so short a chance had to be taken with tires, road, police and everything else. The stake was worth it.
One cannot race along the roads of south-east England and race very far. So the inevitable happened. Ten miles outside of Brighton, when Gleason was doing something better than forty miles an hour, he pretended not to hear a hail from the side of the road, and kept straight on, but he could not help hearing the sharp spatter of a motorcycle behind him a minute later, and instinctively knew it was the police. He slowed down till he was running at about fifteen miles an hour. The officer came alongside. He was plainly angry. "Why didn't you stop when I called to you?" demanded the officer.
"Oh, did you call?" asked the Codfish innocently.
"We are in a great hurry," explained Frank. "We have to be there by one o'clock or one-thirty at the latest."
"Now maybe you will and maybe you won't. Turn that car around and come along with me."