CHAPTER V.

For a Sure Thing.

IT was two days later when Victor Burnham, with a raincoat covering his ordinary raiment, and a peaked cap pulled well down over his brows, stood behind a big racing car in a garage in a back street in Buffalo. With him was a man whose oily overalls and blackened hands proclaimed him a garage employee.

“Now, Dan,” whispered Burnham, as he glanced about to make sure they could not be overheard. “You understand that if I win this race you get a clear thousand dollars.”

“When do I get it?” inquired Dan coldly. “I want it as soon as you run your car off the track.”

“Dan Saltus, you’re just as suspicious now as you ever were,” said Burnham, grinning in a mirthless way. “When you were engineer for me, out in Nevada, I knew that you did not trust anybody—not even your best friend.”

“Best friend, eh?” snorted Mr. Saltus, passing a grimy hand across his almost as grimy face. “Meaning yourself, I suppose?”

“Meaning myself,” assented Burnham. “I was your best friend, and I am now. You would not have this nice little job as foreman of this garage if I hadn’t got it for you.”

“That’s right. Although I don’t know that it is such a nice little job, at that. The men I have around me are all dubs, and if I want anything done right I have to get at it myself. But, never mind that. Drive ahead with what you were going to say.”

Victor Burnham stepped to the door of the garage and looked up and down the short street. It was between six and seven o’clock in the evening, after general business hours, and no one was about. The garage itself was empty but for Burnham and Dan Saltus, the foreman.

“What I was going to say,” resumed Burnham, as he stepped again to the back of the racing car, “is that I have to win this Lawrence Cup.”

“That’s what they’ll all say,” grunted Dan. “I mean, all the drivers.”

“Possibly. But it’s real business with me. I’ve _got_ to win!”

“You’ll take a sporting chance, I suppose?”

“No!” snarled Burnham. “I won’t—if I can help it. This has to be a sure thing for me. Chance won’t do.”

Dan Saltus took up some cotton waste and wiped away a streak of black oil he had just observed on one of the brake rods of the gray racer. It enabled him to avoid a response.

“This car is better than anything to be driven in that race—except one.”

“The Thunderbolt?”

“Yes.”

“I see. But what are you going to do about it?”

Victor Burnham glanced furtively about him. Then he moved close to the grimy mechanic, still busy with his waste, and whispered in his ear:

“What can _you_ do about it?”

“I don’t get you.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” insisted Burnham. “But you don’t want to admit it. You’re not a bonehead exactly.”

“Thanks! But you’ll have to come across more plainly than this if you want a straight answer from me,” declared Dan doggedly.

“Very well. I will.”

There was utter silence for perhaps a quarter of a minute. Victor Burnham hardly knew how to frame in words what he wanted to say. Like most men of his type, he was always fearful of placing himself in the power of anybody.

“Of course, Dan, I know you are straight with me. I’m not afraid of your giving any of this conversation away. Even if you did, it would not make any difference. No one would believe you.”

“No one would have to,” retorted Dan. “I don’t talk about my private business. And this is plumb private. Go on, Mr. Burnham. You are so leery of what you say, that anybody would think you’re planning a murder. What’s it all about?”

“If that Thunderbolt had some little thing the matter with it, so that it did not yield all the power it has generally been able to deliver, or so that it would gradually give out—without danger to the driver, of course——”

“Nothing like that could happen without danger to the driver,” threw in Dan. “When a car is going ninety or a hundred miles an hour, or even fifty, there is a chance of the driver’s neck being broken if anything slips. You know that, Mr. Burnham.”

“It does not always follow,” insisted Burnham, “especially when it is only some _little_ thing. In every big race a lot of cars draw out before the finish with some small thing the matter.”

“What, for instance?” growled Dan.

“A flaw in a connecting rod, engine trouble of some kind, carburetor not working just right—any one of a dozen things. I leave it to you what to do. But I want the Thunderbolt to come in behind the Columbiad I drive.”

“Why can’t you drive on the level?” demanded Dan sulkily. “You have a car here that can walk away from any of them. I know. I’ve driven it myself, and I saw you in the trial. Why, you did your ninety miles and over—that is, an average of that—in your trial, and you had any amount of power that you didn’t call on. Why don’t you go into the race and trust to your machine? That’s what I’d do.”

Victor Burnham ripped out an oath in a low tone that made up in foulness what it lacked in volume.

“I’m not asking what you’d do,” he rasped. “I want you to do this thing for me, and I’ll pay you for doing it.”

“You will give me the thousand you promised if you win the race? I agreed to take that, but it was only for seeing that the machine was in perfect condition. I didn’t bargain for any real crooked work for that money,” growled Dan.

“It was understood.”

“No, it wasn’t. If you want anything more than straight goods from me, you’ve got to hand over something more than a thousand—a great deal more.”

“I’ll give you another thousand.”

“Making two thousand altogether?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll do what you want me to. But—wait a moment. One thousand will have to be paid, whether you win or not. I’m not taking _all_ the chances. Suppose I get at the Thunderbolt, and I’m seen. Where would I come in? It might take a thousand dollars for a lawyer to clear me. I’ve got to have a thousand before I’ll take the contract. You know I’m square. I won’t take your money and not do the job.”

Victor Burnham reflected with deeply contracted brows, and as he did so, any casual observer would have said that he was the very incarnation of evil. Indeed, he might have been plotting murder, as Dan Saltus had intimated, so far as could be told from the expression of his dark face.

“Here’s the thousand, Dan,” he said at last, drawing a wallet from an inside pocket. “Do you promise to get at the Thunderbolt?”

“For a thousand dollars—yes,” replied Dan, holding out his hand for the money.

Without speaking, Victor Burnham opened the wallet and counted ten hundred-dollar bills into the garage foreman’s hand.

“I’d rather have had it in smaller bills,” grumbled Dan. “It isn’t so easy to get a century changed without people wondering where you got it. But I dare say I can get away with it.”

He rolled the money into a small package and put it in a pocket under his overalls, looking at the racing car before him as he did so.

“This Columbiad is in good shape, I suppose, Dan. Nothing hurt it in the trial?”

“Not a thing. I have been over it carefully, and taken a long time to do it. She’s ready for the race this minute, if you wanted to take her out. I’ll be your mechanician, of course—as I was in the trial—and I’ll know that she’s tuned up to concert pitch when we line up. I’ve got plenty of gas in her. But I’ll draw it all out and put in fresh gas before the race, of course. I’ve got the very best grade of gasoline on the market, and I’ve strained it three times already, to make sure she’s clean.”

Victor Burnham nodded perfunctorily at all this. He knew Dan Saltus would look after all details. Gasoline, water, oil, and every part of the ugly gray machine, with its great white figure 7 painted on it in several places, would be exactly right. That was not what he had to think about.

What troubled him was that the Thunderbolt—a wonderful racer that never had been beaten by an American car so far—would also be in perfect condition. With everything else equal, he feared that Stanley Downs could push ahead of the Columbiad.

“I don’t know that he could do it,” muttered Burnham, half aloud. “But he might. That’s what has to be prevented.”

“I’ll prevent it all right,” declared Dan, who had overheard. “Do you want to look her over any more? If you don’t, I’ll take her to the storeroom and lock her in.”

“I’ve seen enough of her,” replied Burnham. “Take her up.”

Dan Saltus dropped into the low driver’s seat—with its comfortable cushions, which gave just room for the mechanician to sit by the side of the driver—and skillfully guided the car upon a flat platform elevator a few yards away.

The smoothness with which the powerful machine rolled along the concrete floor, so slowly that it appeared hardly to be moving, proved that it was a perfect bit of mechanism. One could hardly realize that its gaunt, rakish frame held the potency of a hundred miles an hour and more. It just crawled now—no more.

Victor Burnham waited patiently until Dan Saltus had taken the car to an upper floor, where it would be locked up in an iron fireproof room by itself. When the foreman came down again, Burnham remarked that the trial of the Thunderbolt was to take place at the speedway at ten the next morning.

“I know it,” replied Dan.

“You’ll be there?”

“I guess so. The boss here doesn’t like me to be away too much, for we are pretty busy. But I can trust my assistant for that length of time. We have some good men working for us, too. That’s one comfort. But you don’t want me to do any work on the Thunderbolt to-morrow, do you?” he added, with the ghost of a grin.

“No,” growled Burnham. “So long as you are on the job when the race comes off, I don’t ask anything more. But I want you to see this Thunderbolt in real action at the trial. It may give you some ideas as to how you are to fix it afterward. Good night, Dan.”

He walked out of the garage without looking back. Outside, he lighted a cigar, which he puffed contentedly as he went along.

“The coldest proposition I ever went up against,” reflected Dan Saltus, aloud, looking after the departing Burnham. “By gravy, I believe he’d rather have that young fellow Downs killed than not. If Burnham knew I was on to his game to the very bottom, he’d be surprised, I reckon. _He_ thinks _I_ think all he cares about is to win this race just for the sake of the glory and my thousand dollars. Strange how things come about. If it hadn’t been that Hank Swartz is a friend of mine, I’d never have got on to it all. As it is, I reckon that——Hello, Hank! Where did you blow in from?”

A wide-shouldered, lean-faced man, with the deep tan on his face that told of outdoor life in the open country—for he could not have got so brown anywhere else—strolled into the garage and coolly appropriated the one wooden chair in sight, which was usually occupied by the foreman when he had nothing else to do.