“Why shouldn’t I? My makers pay for speed, too. And when they send me along something with more power to it, I guess I’ll lap you every mile. I think you’re mean to knock me just because I’m not a man.”
“You see?” said Santoni, shrugging his shoulders.
Whereupon the daredevil mumbled apologies, and retreated to the garage in great discomfiture. He sat brooding on a pile of gasolene-cans and watched Wild Will Ryan circling the track in a private try-out; but instead of the racing auto-cycle, he saw only two black eyes that stared reproachfully, and heard a small, curiously deep, and husky voice that assured him over and over again that he was mean.
When Ryan dismounted, red-eyed and hoarse from cleaving the air like a projectile, Ted was still fidgeting with a wrench and muttering gloomily.
“Is it a goil?” asked Ryan.
“Search me. It looks like one—a little brown girl about as big as a ten-cent cigar. But with a nerve! Tips me the crinkled nose because I said she might get in the way on a small track. Reckons I don’t average ninety—me, that’s held five records! And when her dear manufacturers, understand me, send her the cute little peacherino of a sixteen-cylinder, eighty-horse dynamite-gun that they’re building for her to go to finishing-school on, she’s going to make me look like a pram-pusher with paralysis. Can you beat it?”
“Never heard of her,” said Ryan. “She must be a new one in this game.”
“Oh, she’s all kinds of new, take it from me. But if she tries to do ninety an hour round this saucer, we won’t pick up enough of her to be worth dressing.”
Teddy swung off to remove the stains of toil from his face. When he reappeared, normally dapper, as becomes a successful autocyclist, he found little Miss Simmons preparing to try the track. Her costume wrung from him an involuntary exclamation. Her cap, coat, and knickers were all of gleaming scarlet leather.
“Isn’t she the dandy?” grinned Ryan, as they stood aside and watched her. “I reckon she knows the business, at that. She just shooed her mechanic away, and started in to fix all the juice connections herself. And look at her now, testing every spoke with her fingers. Some great kid!”