“All right, you shall. You shall pay it. But just now we need you for this new service. Can you trust me to see that your affairs come out all right?”
“Yes, sir.” Johnny looked him in the eye.
“All right. Be back in my office here at this time day after to-morrow. In the meantime, you are on your own.”
“There’s one thing more,” said Johnny. “This fellow Pant is an old friend of mine; he’s seen me through a lot of things. Any objection to his going along?”
“None whatever. He’ll be a help to you, and between you, you must guard the car well, for you must not for one minute forget that it contains almost our entire supply of the precious new steel, and that as yet we do not know the formula.”
“We’ll do our best,” said Johnny, as he pulled on his cap and left the room.
CHAPTER VII
A RACE ACROSS THE DESERT
Johnny was puzzled and not a little worried. The chummy roadster, equipped with connecting-rods of the new steel, which had carried them seven thousand miles without a mishap, lunged first to one side of the road, then to the other. It leaped forward to bury itself in a cloud of dust that lay deep as mud on the desert trail. To the right and left of them and before them, far as eye could see, was sagebrush. The air was permeated with the odor of it.
They were two hundred miles from anywhere, in the heart of the Great American Desert, and behind them, like a streak of fire, a long, low red car was bearing down upon them. It was this car that puzzled and worried him.
“Can’t give her more gas, can you?” Pant asked hoarsely. “They’re gaining fast.”