he night and silence. He looked
at his watch. It was twenty minutes after eight. She had forty miles
ahead of her, a return of forty miles.

"It will take her two hours each way," he muttered, "unless she means
to pile her car up in a ditch somewhere. Four hours for the trip.
That means I won't see her until well after midnight."

And then he grinned a shade sheepishly; Blenham was right. He had
thought of those four hours as though they had been four years.

But for her part Terry had no intention of being four hours driving a
round trip of any eighty miles that she knew of; she had never done
such a thing before and could see no cause for beginning to-night.
True, the roads were none too good at best, downright bad often enough.

Well, that was just the sort of thing she was used to. And to-night
there was need for haste. Great haste, thought the girl anxiously, as
she remembered the look on her father's face when she and the
storekeeper's wife had gotten him into bed.

"I'll have the roads all to myself; that's one good thing."

She settled herself in her seat, preparing for a tense hour. She, too,
had marked the time; it had been on the verge of twenty minutes after
eight as she left the store. "What right has the only doctor in the
country to play chess, anyway? And with old Hell-Fire Packard at that?
Two precious old rascals they are, I'll be bound. But a rascal of a
doctor is better than no doctor at all, and-- Ah, a good, open bit of
road!"

The car leaped to fresh speed under her. She glanced at her
speedometer; the needle was wavering between twenty-seven and thirty
miles. She narrowed her eyes upon the road; it invited; she shoved the
throttle on her wheel a little further open; thirty miles,
thirty-three, thirty-five--forty, forty-five--there she kept it for a
moment--only a moment it seemed to her breathless impatience. For next
came a series of curves where her road, rising, went over the first
ridge of hills and where on either hand danger lurked.

Beyond the ridge the road straightened out suddenly. Better time now:
twenty-five miles, thirty, thirty-five--and then, down in the valley,
forty-five miles, fifty, fifty-five--her horn blaring, sending far and
wide its defiant, warning echoes, her headlights flashing across trees,
fences, patches of brush, and rolling hills--sixty miles.

"If my tires only stick it out--they ought to--this road hasn't a sharp
rock on it."

But from