Nobody paid much attention to the white car as its heavy panting became quieter and then died away, nor did they notice the tall, strapping man with the boyish face who climbed out from the driver’s seat, nor the broken little figure who climbed with him. As one of the reporters had said, “Sammy Stevenson always looks as if he had just jumped out of a cold plunge.” The expression was very pat. The boyish Stevenson’s skin always seemed tingling, coloring; his eyes clear and wide-open; his body tense, full-blown, strong. And as he kept step with his companion in their walk toward the house, one would have said that the contrast was pitiless; for the other man was a cripple. One of his legs was shorter than the other; as he walked, his body swayed from side to side; his left sleeve was empty. His whole frame looked gaunt, emaciated, racked—racked, one thought immediately, by some terrible accident that had disfigured his face, lining it with a long, white scar. Though hideously ugly, broken in body, the little man walked with his head well up, his chin high. And Stevenson regarded him as he might have regarded a deity.
Out in Detroit, at the Mercury Motor-Car Company factory, everybody knew the little man as “Old Lescault.” Five years before this time he had appeared mysteriously, and in a few hours the factory had hired him as a “racing expert.” He had taken Sammy Stevenson from the testing service, put him on one of the racing-cars, and taught him “the game.” In his department his word was law. Even John Willard, the company’s gruff and positive president, who never had been known to take advice, obeyed this hideous little Frenchman, who ruled all with a word, a grimace, and made the sturdy, self-reliant Stevenson his personal worshiper and the hostile factory hands his sympathetic friends.
Just now Jean Lescault was busy explaining something to Stevenson. The young man listened intently.
“You’ll lose time on those turns,” Lescault was saying, “unless you take them the way I tell you. Instead of swinging wide and describing a curve, I want you to do this: rush the car right into the turn, jam on the brakes, skid around on your front wheels, and then shoot ahead. Look!” He quickly sketched a diagram on the breakfast-cloth. “There,” he exclaimed, looking up, “that shows how you’ll cut time on the fellow who curves around. It’s dangerous, but not if you keep your head. You tried it at Jericho this morning and made it. Do it at every turn hereafter.”
Stevenson nodded. Jean Lescault would be obeyed.
But Lescault wanted to tell him other things. It was his first morning on the course. For some reason he had seen fit to remain in New York despite Stevenson’s urging him to come down. Now, as they finished breakfast, and Stevenson, pushing back his chair, remarked that he was going out to see that the mechanics put away the car properly, a last question came to Lescault’s lips:
“How”—he paused—“how is Giron getting along?”
Stevenson hesitated before answering.
“Do you know him?” he asked.
“No,” said Lescault.