The Ominous Car

Gerard paused on the steps of the cement plateau overlooking the racetrack, his eyebrows lifting in the wave of humor glinting across his face like sunlight over quiet water.

"What?" he wondered. "Who--"

The grinning mechanician who had just come across from the row of training-camps opposite supplied the information.

"Oh, that's Rose's rose. Ain't he awful tweet?" he mocked.

Gerard continued to smile, but his clear amber eyes grew keenly appraising as they followed the flight of the rose-colored racing car around the circular track.

"He can drive," he gave laconic verdict.

"Sure," assented the mechanician. "But he'll be the last rose of summer, all right, when the race comes off. He'll not last twenty-four hours-a kid amateur. If you ain't coming over, I'll lead myself back to my job."

"You never can tell," warned Gerard, tolerantly. "No, I'm not coming over, Rupert; run along."

He moved over to one of the grand-stand seats, as he spoke, and sat down, leaning on the rail with an easy movement of his supple figure. That was the first characteristic strangers usually noted in him: an exquisite Hellenic grace of strength and faultless proportion. He was a man's beauty, as distinguished from a beauty-man; other men were given to admiring him extravagantly and unresentfully. Unresentfully, because of his utter practicality and matter-of-fact atmosphere.

The afternoon sunshine glittered goldenly across the huge, green field and the mile track circling it, where four racing cars sped in practice contest. Two of them were painted gray, one was dingy-white; the fourth shone in delicate pink enamel touched here and there with silver-gilt. Its driver and mechanician were clad in pink also, adding the completing stroke to an effect suggesting the circus rather than the race track. There was much excuse for the laughter of the camps, and that reflection of it lying in Gerard's eyes.

Yet, the rose-colored machine was well driven. More than once the watcher nodded in quick approval of a skilful turn or deft man?uvre. Once he rose and changed his position to see more distinctly, and it was then that he first noticed the girl.

She was so beautifully and expensively gowned as to draw even masculine notice of the fact, the veil that fell from her silk hood to the hem of her cloak would alone have purchased the motor costume of the average woman. Against this filmy drapery her intent face showed as a study in concentration; her dark-blue eyes wide behind their black lashes, her soft lips apart, she too was watching the pink racer. But there was no laughter in her expression, instead there was the most deep and earnest tenderness, a blending of the childish and the maternal that made Gerard catch his breath and glance enviously at the driver of the gaudy car.

The afternoon was almost ended; as Gerard looked, the pink machine finished its last circuit and plunged through the paddock entrance, to come to a halt before its own tent in the "white city" of training camps. Simultaneously the girl in the upper rows of seats arose, catching up her swirl of pale silk and lace garments and hurrying precipitately down the stairway aisle. So great was her haste that, coming suddenly to the last step, one small, high-heeled suède shoe slipped from the iron edge and flung her violently against a column of the stand. Gerard reached her just in time to prevent further fall.

"Stand still," he cautioned, quietly steady. "There is a second flight of stairs. You are not hurt, I hope?"

Giddy, for a moment she willingly suffered his support, then drew back on the narrow landing, her color returning vividly.

"No," she answered. "I am not hurt. I thank you very much."

Thick waves of fair hair lay across her forehead above the delicate dark line of her brows, her candid regard met his with the dignity of utter naturalness and a young confidence in the goodness of all men. The impression Gerard received was original; he fancied that her home life must have been singularly happy and innocent, and that he should like to know her father.

"You will let me take you down the rest of the way, at least," he offered, accepting the situation as simply as she had done.

She glanced down the stairs with a slight shiver, still shaken and unnerved.

"You are very good. My car is beyond the corner, there. I-I am in haste to reach it."

GIDDY, SHE WILLINGLY SUFFERED HIS SUPPORT, THEN DREW BACK, HER COLOR RETURNING VIVIDLY

That had been obvious. Yet, as she laid her gloved hand on Gerard's arm, she lingered to look again in the direction of the training-camps.

"The cars will not go out again to-day?" she inferred, half-questioningly.

"No, I think not. It is already late. This way?"

"Please; to the rear of the club-house."

They descended to the lower floor and crossed a strip of sandy ground to where a large foreign-built touring car waited, empty save for the chauffeur.

"I am running away from my brother," the young girl explained; then, with a playfulness tinged with pathos, "He is practicing out there. And it vexes him if I watch him or say I am afraid for him. He tells me to stay home and forget it. But sometimes I cannot. To-day I could not. Thanks to you, I shall escape before he finds me."

The "kid amateur's" sister, of course, Gerard thought, as he put her in the car.

"Do you always do as he says?" he queried whimsically. "I have no sister, but I did not understand that was the rule."

She turned to him her soft, completely feminine face, and gleamed into laughter.

"I am the only passive member of a strong-willed family," she told him. "I am always doing what some one bids. Thank you, and good-by."

The margin of safe escape was not great. As Gerard stepped back on the cement promenade, the pink machine shot across and came to a halt near the exit, its driver turning in his seat.

"Any one going to town?" he called, his imperious young voice ringing across the open spaces.

"No," came the discouraging monosyllable from the official stand.

"No one?"

"No."

The driver slowly sent his car forward, temper in every crisp movement, his gaze travelling over the empty tiers of seats, to fall at last upon Gerard and there rest. With a jerk he jammed down the brake and leaned from the machine. Thick fair hair lay across his boyish forehead above level dark brows, his candid dark-blue eyes went direct to their goal: the metal badge fastened to Gerard's lapel and just visible under the edge of his gray overcoat.

"You're wearing a chauffeur's license," he challenged.

"I surely am. Want to engage a man?" was the grave response.

The boy's arch glance swept the other's face, so definitely stamped with the habit of mastery.

"If I did I'd ask you to recommend one," he retorted mirthfully. "I'm not as much mixed as I sounded; I wasn't thinking of hiring you. But I did want to ask if you would ride into the city with me. My mechanician is busy over there, I can't find any one else to go with me, and I've got to get my car down to the Renard shop to-night."

"Now I wonder," Gerard mused aloud, "why you want any one with you."

"Because I won't be eighteen for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. Oh, of course you'd laugh!"

"I was only recalling what I've just been watching you do on the track," apologized Gerard, steadying his countenance. "And speculating upon how the average chauffeur would like to try your feats. I shall appreciate the honor of riding into town with Mr. Rose and his rose."

The driver colored and laughed together, as his guest took the seat beside him.

"They're always ragging me-I mean the professional racers and motor men," he avowed, in a burst of resentful confidence. "They called me kid amateur, and rosebud, and girlie, until I just had my car painted pink and bought these pink suits and told them to go ahead getting all the fun they could. I'll get my turn to-morrow night." He twisted his car through the curved gateway, viciously expert.