“Ho!” he cried, “this is how you looked when you won the Grand Prix, when they pelted you with flowers after you had crossed the line, when with your dirty driving you sent me into a ditch and left me out on that road, dying, as you thought. But I didn’t die, Léon Giron.”
His voice had fallen to a whisper, strained, harsh, the way a man talks when some overpowering emotion takes him. He snatched up picture after picture,—racing scenes all of them,—only to examine each feverishly and fling it away.
“Here you are when you won the Targa Floria,—” he was talking rapidly, addressing one picture after another,—“when you won the Berlin cup, the Czar’s trophy, all my races, all of them—mine, if you’d played square. And this is after you won at Brooklands. That was a year ago. I could have beaten you then, Giron. For three years I’ve been training a boy for you, teaching him all I know, more than you’ll ever know, about racing. I’ve given him every trick that used to beat you, confound you! that maddened on into throwing me into the ditch.
“And I’ve given that boy more. I’ve devised new tricks, new strategies, skill you’ve never dreamed of; and he’ll beat you, Léon Giron. He’ll beat you in the Vanderbilt. He’ll break you on the greatest day of your career. He, a boy, will make you a laughing-stock—you, the favorite. You’ve come from Europe, your great reputation preceding you but you’ll fail. And it’ll be the clean, strong body of young Stevenson, like mine was. But more than that, the brain of Jean Lescault will break you, Giron—the brain of poor old Lescault, working down in the pits.”
As he dropped the pictures one by one back into the box, as, trembling and leering, he gazed and spat upon the image of Giron, it seemed as though the beast in him might be trying to overpower the God. Thus it was Lescault’s custom to drink deeply of the vials of hate, to nurse his spleen, to envenom his whole being against this one man.
The idea had come to him one winter morning seven years before, when he had just left the hospital at Lariboisière. In a shop-window he had seen the photograph of Giron, flower-showered, coolly triumphant in his Grand Prix car. With rancor slowly filling his soul, Lescault had bought the picture, carried it to his room, brooded over it, conceived his awful hate, planned the reckoning that alone could satisfy it. Then he happened upon another picture in which Giron was again the central figure, and bought that, too, placed it alongside the other, and brooded. The overthrow of Giron became an obsession, in time a paranœa. Indeed, during the days immediately preceding the Vanderbilt race, Lescault, when not busy with Stevenson, spent most of his time in his room; and the pictures, shrine of his hatred, were always before him.
Meanwhile Giron had become a byword with those thousands and thousands who a day hence would swarm Hempstead plains and watch him guide the big Saturn on its quest for the cup. The newspapers were full of him. They told of his rise, of his quarters at Jericho, of his mannerisms, of the almost slavish obedience that he exacted of his helpers; but they always spoke, too, of his nerve, his utter fearlessness, his immobile face, his calmness when the wind was singing in his ears and the wheels were sweeping the ground beneath him, as the whirlwind sweeps chaff. Yet of all the “stories” there was only one that presented Giron as he actually was. And that was done by a noted writer who had visited the course for “color.” This man saw beyond Giron’s indifference and coldness, and guessed ruthlessness and cruelty to be a strong part of him. Telltale lines had long ago written their revelations on Giron’s mouth, so that all might read who could.
And so came the eve of the race, with Giron the word on the public’s lips. The favorite, conceded beyond all doubt as the winner, he sat alone in his quarters at Jericho, scorning the gossip of the camps, hearing no word of the cripple who had been seen on the course with Stevenson, coolly confident, an eternal sneer on his lips, the ruthless fires of a Messala in his eyes. No man could come between him and this greatest triumph of his career; no man could do it and live. He unconsciously felt it.
All that night the spectators descended upon the course, coming by train and trolley, luncheon-boxes and blankets in hand. Numberless droves of them came by motor, an endless, fiery-scaled snake that writhed slowly down the roads from New York, coiled round the course, moaned constantly, and waited. At dawn the race was to start; thirty of the most powerful automobiles ever made would pit their speed for three hundred miles, a harsh test, over an oblong of country road, with half a million people looking on.
Lescault, shivering despite his warm wraps, was in the repair pits as the cars began to come to the line. Tints of violet and pink were creeping over the fields, and in the growing light of morning the headlights of a row of automobiles drawn up behind the grand-stand fence began to look self-conscious and absurd. Behind him, in a box, he saw a party of men, their eyes heavy-lidded for want of sleep. They were drinking something from a metal bottle. Lescault decided it was coffee, and wished he had some. Then he forgot about the coffee, for far in the distance a sound, deep and droning, caught his ear. It was the voice of the Saturn. Lescault recognized it instantly.