“Yes, it looks as if I had,” Ford answered. “The question is, what good is it? Is there a man on earth who’d try to drive it?”
“Well, I’ve got some nerve myself, and I don’t want to,” Cooper admitted. He walked around the car and then looked again at the engine. “How fast would the darn thing go, I wonder?” he said.
“Get in and try her,” Ford suggested. Cooper climbed in, Ford cranked the engine, and again sleeping Detroit jumped from its bed. The car leaped and shot down the avenue.
When it roared back again Cooper stopped it in the middle of the street.
“That settles it for me,” he said. “She must have made forty miles an hour, and she wasn’t half running, at that. I won’t take her out on the track.”
They confronted the situation gloomily. Couzens was depending on the success of the car at the races to bring his men in line for the organization of a company; here was the car, built at the cost of months of work and some hundreds of Cooper’s money, and it developed such speed that it was not safe to enter it for the race.
Suddenly Cooper had an idea.
“See here! I know a man—if there’s a man on earth who would take that car out he’s the one!” he said. “He isn’t afraid of anything under the shining sun—a bicycle rider I raced against in Denver. Oldfield’s his name—Barney Oldfield.”
“Never heard of him,” said Ford. “But if you think he would drive this car let’s get hold of him. Where is he?”
“He ought to be in Salt Lake now,” Cooper answered. “I’ll wire him.”