DRIFTING mists enveloped the landscape, a thousand gray wraiths crawling through the air, their thin bodies changing, contracting, vanishing. Over toward Massapequa the sky was brightening, distant lights of purple and pink fighting their way through the mists, a dim burning of color like that of fire through smoke. Somewhere a rooster crowed; a dog barked drowsily. Already the vague shadows of the night were congealing into trees, a rail fence, farm buildings. Beyond them more trees, a stone wall, a red barn appeared. From the earth rose the fresh odors of a new day.
In the windows of the house on the opposite side of the road lights appeared. The figure of a man moved into shadow on a curtain and was gone. No sound came from within. Then a door creaked open, feet shuffled. Four men, carrying lanterns, issued forth and waited on the porch. They began to talk in hoarse, early morning voices. The door opened again; a powerful, soldierly looking man appeared. He said something in a foreign tongue, and the others, lighting their lanterns, hurried toward the barn.
When they were gone, Léon Giron, whom the newspapers called “the greatest automobile race-driver in the world,” lighted a cigarette and scowled. Indeed, he had begun the last ten days in the same way—the cigarette, the scowl. This daybreak practice on the Vanderbilt Cup Course had become distasteful. It was unnecessary, with the race as good as won. Still, his employees had insisted. Scowling again, Giron waited for his mechanicians to roll out the big Saturn.
He had thought of trying the twenty-mile cup course for speed or of studying the turns, most particularly the one just opposite, where the Jericho Turnpike bent into a right angle and continued as a narrow road. He was still undecided when from down the pike came the low rumbling of a motor. Louder and louder it grew, a growing succession of reports that split the quiet air like volleys of musketry. Now Giron could see the flames of its exhausts, the yellow and red flashes, wild fire shining through the mists. Now he saw the white bulk of the machine, the long, lean hood, the tilted steering-post, the two black forms crouched behind.
On it came, faster than the wind, a spew of flame and smoke, a voice-breathing thunder, a monstrous white dragon bursting the dawn. As Giron watched, as his trained eye timed instantly the frightful speed, as his experience whispered that for a car to rush the Jericho turn meant disaster, possible death, the man’s face showed only cold interest. Years before men had called him steel-nerved, ruthless, abnormally cruel.
But now the white car crashed past. Swerving, it threw up a wall of flying dirt, skidded terribly, shot across the road, seemed about to go off, but, righting, bellowed round “the Jericho,” and rushed toward Westbury. And as it went, as its dust-cloud trembled and fell, as its explosions grew fainter and fainter, Giron stood watching, a startled figure leaning far over the porch-rail, unbelief and venom in his face. And as he watched, waiting until the white car was only a speck dissolving toward Westbury, his lips began to move. To the air he talked doubtfully, musingly, saying aloud:
“I thought there was only one man who could take a turn like that. One man,”—his eyes glittered,—“Jean Lescault was his name, and I fixed him seven years ago.”
Turning abruptly, he walked toward the garage.
Meanwhile the white car, passing Westbury, had turned off the course and, rumbling contentedly, had come to a stop before Krugs. As you may know, Krugs, an old-fashioned Long Island road-house kept by a tidy German woman, has for years been the quarters of the cup-racers. Here in spacious stables are kept the machines of two companies, sometimes of three. Here in the uncomfortable rooms of the inn sleep their crews, drivers, mechanics, team-managers. In its low-ceilinged dining-room they sit, a score of them, smudgy-faced and in overalls, a careless, boyish company whose faces, were they not so lined, you would call young.