nt lunging up the crooked steep trail to the
Bluebird mine on top of the hill, his engine racing and screaming in low.

Thereafter Pinnacle and Lund had a new standard by which to measure the
courage of a man. Had he made the trip with Casey Ryan and his new Ford?
He _had_? By golly, he sure had nerve. One man passed the peak for sheer
bravery and rode twice with Casey, but certain others were inclined to
disparage the feat, on the ground that on the second trip he was drunk.

Casey did not like that. He admitted that he was a hard driver; he had
always been proud because men called him the hardest driver in the West.
But he argued that he was also a safe driver, and that they had no
business to make such a fuss over riding with him. Didn't he ride after
his own driving every day of his life? Had he ever got killed? Had he ever
killed anybody else? Well! What were they all yawping about, then?
Pinnacle and Lund made him tired.

"If you fellers think I can't bounce that there tin can down the road fast
as any man in the country, why don't yuh pass me on the road? You're
welcome. Just try it."

No one cared to try, however. Meeting him was sufficiently hazardous.
There were those who secretly timed their traveling so that they would not
see Casey Ryan at all, and I don't think you can really call them cowards,
either. A good many had families, you know.

Casey had an accident now and then; and his tire expense was such as to
keep him up nights playing poker for money to support his Ford. You simply
can't whirl into town at a thirty-mile gait--I am speaking now of
Pinnacle, whose street was a gravelly creek bed quite dry and ridgy
between rains--and stop in twice the car's length without scouring more
rubber off your tires than a capacity load of passengers will pay for.
Besides, you run short of passengers if you persist in doing it. Even the
strangers who came in on the Salt Lake line were quite likely to look once
at the cute little narrow-gauge train with its cunning little day coach
hitched behind a string of ore cars, glance at Casey's Ford stage with
indifference and climb into the cunning day coach for the trip to
Pinnacle. The psychology of it passed quite over Casey's head, but his
pocket felt the change.

In two weeks--perhaps it was less, though I want to be perfectly just--
Casey was back, afoot and standing bow-legged in the doorway of Bill
Master's garage at Lund.

"Gimme another one of them Ford auty