ike a wild creature, began to hum at a swift clip along the smooth,
white road toward Newburgh on the Hudson.

Thirty miles an hour the speedometer showed, then thirty-five and forty.
Again the drunken chauffeur, still master of his machine despite the
poison pulsing in his dazed brain, snicked the little levers further
down. Forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, the figures on the dial showed.

Now the exhaust ripped in a crackling staccato, like a machine gun, as
the chauffeur threw out the muffler. Behind, a long trail of dust rose,
whirling in the air. Catherine, a sportswoman born, leaned back and
smiled with keen pleasure, while her yellow veil, whipping sharply on
the wind, let stray locks of that wonderful red-gold hair stream about
her flushed face.

Thus she sped homeward, driven at a mad race by a man whose every sense
was numbed and stultified by alcohol--homeward, along a road up which,
far, far away, another man, keen, sober and alert, was trudging with a
knapsack on his broad back, swinging a stick and whistling cheerily as
he went.

Fate, that strange moulder of human destinies, what had it in store for
these two, this woman and this man? This daughter of a billionaire, and
this young proletarian?

Who could foresee, or, foreseeing, could believe what even now stood
written on the Book of Destiny?

CHAPTER XIII.

CATASTROPHE!

For a time no danger seemed to threaten. Kate was not only fearless as a
passenger, but equally intrepid at the wheel. Many a time and oft she
had driven her father's highest-powered car at dizzying speeds along
worse roads than the one her machine was now following. Velocity was to
her a kind of stimulant, wonderfully pleasurable; and now, realizing
nothing of the truth that Herrick was badly the worse for liquor, she
leaned back in the tonneau, breathed the keen slashing air with delight,
and let her eyes wander over the swiftly-changing panorama of forest,
valley, lake and hill that, in ever new and more radiant beauty, sped
away, away, as the huge car leaped down the smooth and rushing road.

Dust and pebbles flew in the wake of the machine, as it gathered
velocity. Beneath it, the highway sped like an endless white ribbon,
whirling back and away with smooth rapidity. No common road, this, but
one which the State authorities had very obligingly built especially for
the use of millionaires' motor cars, all through the region of
country-clubs, parks, bungalows and sum