And there was plenty of dust! It circled, and eddied, and rolled, outlining the course as far as the eye could see.
At the difficult turn leading into the river road, Matt passed Patsy Grier's overturned car. Grier had failed to negotiate the turn and had gone into the ditch. Grier himself seemed to have escaped without injury, but he was busily bandaging his mechanic's arm.
The river road was an exceedingly difficult part of the circuit. The timber kept the wind from dissipating the dust, and it spread out like a fog. Matt could hear cars ahead and behind, but he could not see them. Intuition, rather than anything else, carried him safely by two of the touring-cars, one of which was suffering from tire-trouble.
Mings, in the Stark-Frisbie, and Balt Finn, in the Bly-Lambert, were both ahead of Matt, and he thought only of getting past them. He was not intending, however, to do much more than hold his own against the better cars during the first round.
The motor was pulling magnificently. Matt, his heart leaping with the joy of the sport, opened the machine out a little more on the fine road from the river to Le Loup.
He passed several more cars, but not Mings', or Finn's. The climb to Coal Run was splendidly made. Between that village and the track he shot past the little "40," smashed into a scrap-heap, and with driver and mechanic standing hopelessly by. Something must have gone wrong with the "40's" steering-gear, for it had left the road and smashed into a big boulder.
All the cars had got well away before Matt came plunging along the track in front of the grand stand. The first round had taken him exactly fifty-eight minutes.
There were only two cars ahead of him—those driven by Mings and Finn.
"Bravo, Matt!" the young motorist heard Trueman shout, high over the ripple of cheering as he dashed past; "only two ahead and you're——"
What the last of it was Matt could not hear. For this second round he was going to cram on all the speed he could. His one idea was to pass Mings and Finn.