and won or lost laughing.

There was a small hotel near the course which the motor-men had made a
rendezvous. Here Gerard established his party, during the two weeks of
practice work. He did not choose to have Corrie in New York, although
Rupert chafed and he himself was obliged to go in to the city
frequently, at considerable inconvenience.

On the last afternoon before the race, he returned from such a trip, and
arrived before the hotel just as Corrie rolled up with the Mercury Titan
and halted it opposite him.

"It's five o'clock," the driver explained, stilling his roaring motor
and leaning out. "Everyone is coming in, to get ready for to-morrow."

There was little trace left of the petulant, gaudily dressed boy who a
year before had driven the pink car, in this serious young professional
clad in the Mercury's racing gray and bearing the Mercury's silver
insignia on his shoulder. The bend of his mouth was firmer, his
dark-blue eyes had acquired the steady, all-embracing keenness of
Gerard's--the gaze of all those men with whom the inopportune flicker of
an eyelid may mean destruction. He was clothed with his virile youth as
with a radiant garment, as he smiled across at Gerard.

"Yes, get some rest; you will be out at dawn," approved Gerard, coming
closer. "Where is Rupert? What is the matter, Corrie? You look
disturbed."

"Rupert got off at the corner, back there. I suppose if I look rattled,
that _he_ is what is the matter. He----" Corrie suddenly dropped his
face in his folded arms as they rested upon the steering-wheel, his
shoulders shaking.

"He? How? He has been talking to you?"

"He sure has been talking to me," Corrie affirmed, lifting his
laughter-flushed face. "When I think that he once gave me the silence
treatment! His tongue would take the starch out of a Chinese laundry and
make a taxicab chauffeur feel he couldn't drive."

"You do not let him talk to you when you are driving!"

"Oh, when I am driving he is the perfect mechanician. He wouldn't open
his lips if I hit a right-angle turn at ninety miles an hour or disobey
if I told him to climb out and cut the tires off the rear wheels. No, it
is when I am not officially driving that he gives me some remarks to
study about. Good pointers, too! I like it, really. I only wish," his
expression shadowed abruptly, "I only wish I didn't have to remember
that nothing could bring him to shake hands with me."

"Corrie----"

"I know--I beg your par