“I didn’t say I wanted to drive in the race,” pouted Helen. “Although I wouldn’t mind doing that if it were considered the proper thing. What I suggested was that it would be nice to send the Thunderbolt over that beautiful, smooth wooden floor of the speedway, just to feel her going at ninety miles an hour.”
“Ninety miles an hour, Helen?” said Clay Varron, with a laugh. “You have your nerve with you. Do you realize that that means a mile and a half a minute?”
“I know the multiplication table, Clay,” she rejoined. “If it is the multiplication table you compute it by. Anyhow, I have driven sixty miles on a road, and I don’t think speed would ever scare me very badly.”
“That’s so,” agreed Lawrence K. Ranfelt boisterously. “By George, Clay, I’d rather trust Helen in a race than a lot of men I know. I’d like to see her in a car against Victor Burnham. I bet she’d make Vic hustle.”
Helen Ranfelt frowned and pinched her father’s arm.
“Was it necessary to bring Mr. Burnham’s name into this?” she asked, in a whisper. “I want to forget him.”
“If you do, you’d better root for Mr. Downs to pull off the race. You know what Burnham expects if he brings the Columbiad in first.”
“What he expects and what he will get may be widely apart, dad,” returned the girl, in her usual tone, and with a carcass laugh and toss of her head. “Anyhow, I’m expecting to see the Thunderbolt do it easily.”
“We shall get a line on it at the trial to-morrow,” observed Varron. “I suppose you haven’t any doubt about it yourself—have you, Stan?”
Stanley Downs smiled, as he patted the gray monster, with its immense white “5” on the front of the radiator, and repeated in three other places, on each side of the hood and at the back.