“Want to, then, will you?” laughed Gordon uneasily. “And—and here’s another car coming, Morris. Hadn’t you better slow down a little?”
“Say, you’re an awful baby,” commented the other. But he lowered the speed of the car still further and, to Gordon’s relief, hugged the fence pretty closely while a big gray touring car shot by them in a cloud of dust. Morris turned a speculative, admiring gaze on it as it passed.
“Thirty-five easily, she’s making,” he said. “Some day I’m going to have one like that. These little cars are all right to knock about in, but they’re too light to get much speed out of.”
“How fast do you want to run, anyway?” grumbled Gordon. “Isn’t twenty miles an hour fast enough?”
“You wait till you run one and you’ll see,” laughed Morris. “Why, twenty miles will seem like standing still to you!”
“It’s fast enough for me,” sighed Gordon. “Besides, this road is so rough that—Morris!”
But Gordon’s cry was too late. There was a bump, a crash, the sound of splintering wood, and——
CHAPTER VIII
ACROSS THE GULLY
Gordon raised himself on one aching elbow and looked dazedly about him. Up the bank a dozen feet away lay the blue runabout on its side, one forward wheel—or the remains of it—thrust through a broken panel of the white fence that guarded that side of the road. A cloud of dust still hovered above the car, proving to Gordon that the accident had happened but the moment before. If it was not for that he could well have imagined that he had lain huddled up in a clump of bushes halfway down the steep bank for some time. His head was spinning wildly and he felt horribly jarred and bruised. But a tentative effort to get to his feet, while it was not successful because of dizziness, showed that at least he had no limbs broken. A second effort, made when the clouds had stopped revolving overhead like a gigantic blue-and-white pin-wheel, brought him staggering to his feet.
Strangely enough, it was not until he stood swaying unsteadily on the bank that he remembered Morris, or, rather, that he felt any concern for him. Anxiously then he looked about on every side. But no Morris was to be seen. Gordon called in a weak and shaky voice. There was no reply. Summoning his strength, Gordon crawled slowly up the side of the declivity, pulling himself by bushes and grass-tufts until at last he was clinging limply to the fence rail. There he leaned for an instant and closed his eyes. He felt very much as if he was going to faint, and perhaps he would have had he not at that moment, just as he seemed about to go off into a deliciously fearsome black void, heard the sound of a low groan.