Baseball -- Juvenile fiction; College students -- Juvenile fiction
Little by little he opened the throttle till the great machine was
rushing along the smooth road at terrific speed. Faster and faster they
flew. The wind whistled in their ears, and all who were not holding on
to their caps lost them. There was no time to stop for such a trivial
item, and indeed nobody even thought of such a thing. To get to the
game, that was the main thing. Also, the lust of speed had entered their
hearts, and while they felt horribly afraid at the frightful pace, there
was a certain mad pleasure in it, too. The speedometer needle crept up
and up, till it touched the sixty-mile-an-hour mark. Reddy wanted to
tell Bert to slacken speed, but feared that the boys would think he was
"scared," so said nothing. Bert's heart thrilled, and the blood pounded
madly through his veins. His very soul called for speed, speed! and he
gradually opened the throttle until it would go no further. The great
car responded nobly, and strained madly ahead. The whirring gears hummed
a strident tune, and the explosions from the now open muffler sounded in
an unbroken roar. The passengers in the machine grew dizzy, and some
were forced to close their eyes to protect them from the rushing,
tearing wind. The fields on both sides streaked away in back of them
like a vari-colored ribbon, and the gray road seemed leaping up to meet
them. The speedometer hand pointed to eighty miles an hour, and now
there was a long decline in front of them. The boys thought that then
Bert would surely reduce the power somewhat, but apparently no such
thought entered his mind. Down the long slope they swooped, and
then--What was that in front of them, that they were approaching at such
terrific speed? At a glance Bert saw that it consisted of two farm
wagons traveling along toward them at a snail's pace, their drivers
engaged in talk, and oblivious of the road in front of them. Bert
touched the siren lever, and a wild shriek burst from the tortured
siren. The drivers gave one startled glance at the flying demon
approaching them, and then started to draw up their horses to opposite
sides of the road. They seemed fairly to crawl and Bert felt an awful
contraction of his heart. What if they could not make it? He knew that
it would have been folly to apply the brakes at the terrific speed at
which they were traveling, and his only chance lay in going between the
two wagons.
Slowly--slowly--the wagons drew over to the side of the road, and Bert
calculated the distance with straining eyes. His hands gripped the wheel
until his knuckles stood out white and tense.
Now they were upon the wagons--and through! A vision of rearing horses,
excited, gesticulating drivers--and they were through, with a scant half
foot to spare on either side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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