“Do you think that we shall overtake them?” I inquired anxiously, for at all hazards I wanted to see and speak again with Ella. What she had told me excited my curiosity and aroused my determination that she should make no further self-sacrifice.
“It all depends,” was his vague answer. “They’ve got a ‘forty,’ you know, an’ can do these hills much better than we can. But they may get a puncture or a tyre-burst.”
“But as to speed. They won’t go quicker than we are travelling?” I inquired.
“Not if they don’t want to get ’ad up,” he grinned, and I then recognised that we were on a wide flat road, travelling at nearly forty miles an hour, and raising a perfect wall of dust behind us. “There’s one or two level-crossings, too, that may delay ’em.”
“And us also, eh?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But what I’m going to do is to go at a greater speed than they’ve gone. We’ve got nearly an hour and a half to make up, by some means or other.”
And lowering his head he set his shoulders in his seat and still increased the speed until we flew at a pace such as I had never before travelled in any motor-car. The engines ticked away with rhythmical music, the machinery hummed with that even tone which tells the practised motorist that his cylinders are working properly, and without once pulling up, we soon found ourselves slowing down to enter the quiet old county town of Dorchester.
At Charminster, where the two high-roads parted, we had news of the blue car we were following. A man breaking stones at the roadside informed us that it had passed about half an hour in front of us.
“It was going at a terrible speed,” he added, in broad Dorset dialect. “They’ll get summoned—you see.”
This caused us to put on more pace, heedless of whether any pair of constables—or hedgehogs as motorists call them—were lurking near the road. Gibbs put on all the speed he could get out of his engines, and we literally flew through Stratton and Frampton. He was, it seemed, determined to earn the couple of sovereigns I had promised him as reward if successful.