The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. There were still four or five hours of daylight left, and while there was any light at all I couldn’t miss the cloud of dust from the fleeing roadster.
I didn’t know whether we were following a road or not. Sometimes the ground under me looked like one, but mostly it didn’t differ much from the rest of the desert. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.
The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious. But if I was going to avoid playing Indian among the rocks and cactus, I would have to get within striking distance of my man before he deserted his car and started a game of hide and seek on foot. I’m a city man. I have done my share of work in the open spaces, but I don’t like it. My taste in playgrounds runs more to alleys, backyards and cellars than to canyons, mesas and arroyos.
I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up—missed it by a hair—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.
The roadster was empty. I kept on.
From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bounding and bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.