In the garage he came upon a mechanic overhauling her mount, an excessively powerful machine with four cylinders, its frame enameled bright scarlet, and nickeled in an unusual degree. It looked a sufficiently dangerous mount for a strong and skilful man racing on a spacious track. He shrank from seeing Sadie ride it in the restricted circle of the soup-plate.
When they appeared on the track in the evening, however, he could no longer ignore her presence. Indeed, she came behind him and slapped him gaily on the shoulder, such a trim, joyously captivating midget, in her scarlet leather motor-jacket, that his heart leaped at the sight of her.
“Who said I couldn’t come back, Teddy Rocco?” she asked, and the familiar, curious huskiness of her voice thrilled him so that he could not reply.
“I’m going to make you look like a never-was to-night, Teddy-Eddy,” she went on, with a sort of malicious exhilaration in her manner. “I expect you’re still single?”
“Oh, cut it out, Sadie!” he pleaded. “I never done you any harm.”
“Do you love me as much as ever?” asked little Miss Simmons, with an unwonted feline delight in cruelty. “The villain thought he had the poor little girl just where he wanted her, didn’t he? But the kind, handsome doctor rescued her all right; and now she’s going to make the villain look like thirty cents.”
“You’ll have to go some,” said Teddy, grinning miserably, as he stooped to adjust his carbureter. When he mounted his machine he was in a white-hot, searing temper. If all the women in the world had been laid side by side on an endless track, he would have ridden over their necks at that moment with an exquisite pleasure.
But though he rode with the courage of bitterness and desperation, he soon found that Sadie had the heels of him. Once or twice when she shot past him with an almost crazy recklessness, the thought flashed through his mind that an imperceptible swerve of his handle-bar would all but inevitably end both their lives, and he weakly throttled down his engine, fearful lest the subconscious working of his tortured mind might communicate a tremor to his arm; and every time that Sadie passed him with a vicious spurt of her diabolical scarlet mount, he caught in her eye a gleam of impish triumph.