CHAPTER VI.

The Heart of the Plot.

“I HAVE been attending to affairs for Burnham,” replied Hank Swartz, when he was comfortably settled in his chair. “I wish I could smoke in here.”

“Well, you can’t,” snapped Dan. “You know that as well as I do. This is a garage.”

“All right. I just dropped in to see how the Columbiad looked? Where is she?”

“She’s put away upstairs, in her own little flat,” answered Dan, with his usual surly grin. “We are not showing her to everybody until the day of the race. Then some of them may see her a little too much. She’s going to win that cup and the purse, Hank.”

“Of course she is. She must. There’ll be a neat little sum in side bets, too. Gee! I reckon Vic Burnham will clean up about fifty thousand. Well, he needs it.”

This time Dan Saltus allowed himself to chuckle outright.

“He sure does. He’s so near broke that if he was to get a hard shove he would tumble clear over into bankruptcy. But he’s a great bluffer. If he can get that girl of Ranfelt’s he’ll be all right. But the other string he has out, on old man Burwin, of Burwin & Son’s bank, is a good one, too.”

“And yet that deal depends rather on this race for the Lawrence cup, just as his winning Helen Ranfelt does,” remarked Hank Swartz wisely.

“How? I don’t quite get that,” responded Dan Saltus.

“Well, you know that Burnham wants to get old Dick Burwin to open a branch bank out in Carson City, and appoint Burnham the president?”

“Sure! I’m wise to that.”

“Well, Burnham has been bluffing the old man that he can put a hundred thousand plunks into the capital of the new bank. That would give an excuse for making him president. Old Burwin likes the scheme, according to Burnham. But Burnham has always been afraid that when it was sprung on Burwin’s nephew, this Stanley Downs, the beans would all be spilled.”

“I reckon that’s so,” agreed Dan thoughtfully. “This Downs is one smart guy. They say his uncle relies on his judgment in ‘most everything he does.”

“That’s what,” was Swartz’s response. “So it’s up to Burnham to keep it away from Stanley Downs—which he has done up to date—or to queer Downs so badly with his uncle that anything he says won’t count. Pretty slick plan, eh, Dan?”

The two men chuckled in concert. Obviously they were both in a plot that appealed to their peculiar temperament, and which it gave them pleasure to discuss at their leisure.

“I hear Stanley Downs has lost twenty thousand dollars belonging to the bank,” remarked Dan, after a short pause.

“Oh, you heard that, eh? Where did you get it?”

“Oh, come off, Hank! What am I on earth for? To walk around with plugs in my ears and blinders on? I can tell you something more about that. Downs is keeping it from his uncle that he’s shy the twenty thousand, and he hopes to get it from this cup race. Isn’t that right?”

“You are not far off, Dan,” admitted Swartz.

“You bet I’m not. Well, he isn’t going to get that twenty thousand, because Burnham, with his Columbiad upstairs, will rush over the finish line while Stanley Downs and his Thunderbolt will be a hundred miles behind, wondering why he ever entered.”

“You’ll get some of the purse, eh, Dan?”

“I’ll be the mechanician. Of course I’ll get some. You don’t think I’m going to take chances of being all broken up for nothing.”

“But won’t you get more than your mechanician’s percentage?” persisted Swartz.

Dan Saltus had been leaning against the doorpost, where he could look up and down the street while conversing with Swartz. He swung around abruptly at the last remark, and there was an expression of anger as well as fear in his eyes.

“What do you mean by that, Hank? Who said I’d get more than my regular bit as a mechanician? Why should I?”

“I don’t know. I only asked,” replied Hank Swartz coolly. “I’m getting paid by Burnham for certain work I’m doing for him. I wouldn’t tell everybody, but I’m not trying to hide it from you. I thought you might loosen up a little to me—that’s all. We’re old pards. We’ve rode, worked, and bunked together out in the West, both in the cattle country and the mines. But if you want to forget all that, why, it goes with me, too.”

There was so much sadness in the way this was said that Dan Saltus felt obliged to respond. He held out his hand to the other.

“I didn’t mean nothing, Hank,” he protested. “Only it ain’t well to talk too much. I’ll only tell you this much, and you can guess the rest if you have a mind to: Victor Burnham is going to win this race with the Columbiad.”

“I see,” replied Swartz. “I’m glad to hear it. That will make things all O. K. for me at my end of it.”

“How?”

“If Burnham wins the race, it will put Stanley Downs in the wrong with his uncle. He’ll be twenty thousand dollars shy, for one thing, and he’ll fall down in a game that he’s supposed to know all the way through from soup to nuts.”

“Then there’s Ranfelt’s girl!” suggested Dan.

“Yes. Not that Stanley Downs wants her. He never met her till yesterday, when he played into our hands by diving into the lake with her and her Fanchon,” laughed Hank. “But Vic Burnham is crazy for her.”

“What are you handing me, Hank?” demanded Saltus, with an incredulous chuckle. “I never knew Vic Burnham to be crazy over any girl. He wants her dad’s money. That’s all.”

“Well, isn’t it all the same?” rejoined Swartz. “He wants her, and he’ll stand a fair show of getting her if he pulls off this race. I’m mighty glad you and he have it framed up to get it for him.”

“There you go again, Hank!” complained Dan Saltus. “Who has anything ‘framed up’? It’s going to be a straight contest, with the best car and driver winning. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. You needn’t fly off the handle just because we are having a little friendly talk. I’m going around to look at the Thunderbolt, if I can. It’s in the Moussard garage. They are not letting strangers look her over, of course. But I know the boys there, and I reckon I can get in to see what she looks like at close range.”

Hank Swartz strolled out, after a friendly “So long!” to Dan, and walked across that part of the city for about a quarter of a mile before he stopped in front of another garage, which was enough like the one where he had left Dan Saltus to be mistaken for it, if it had been next door.

It was in an upstairs warehouse that Swartz found several persons standing around the racer that Stanley Downs was to drive in the trial for two miles on the morrow.

One of the garage men took Swartz up and directed him to stand out of sight behind a big limousine until the party looking at the Thunderbolt went away.

“Then you can give her the once over without one knowing anything about it,” said the man to Swartz. “The boss gave orders that nobody was to see it except Mr. Downs and his friends—and Mr. Ranfelt, of course. They are over there now, but they won’t stay long.”

“All right, Bill,” returned Swartz, as the two sat on the running board of the limousine.

“You will easily qualify at the trial to-morrow, Mr. Downs,” remarked Helen Ranfelt, as Stanley Downs pointed out to her the various items that made up the big Thunderbolt. “I know something about automobiles, and I can see that you have about everything in this car that you could want in a racer. How I should like to drive her over the track myself, just once,” she added wistfully.

“It wouldn’t be as comfortable as your Fanchon, Helen,” put in her father. “Besides, it isn’t customary for young ladies to drive in races.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to drive in the race,” pouted Helen. “Although I wouldn’t mind doing that if it were considered the proper thing. What I suggested was that it would be nice to send the Thunderbolt over that beautiful, smooth wooden floor of the speedway, just to feel her going at ninety miles an hour.”

“Ninety miles an hour, Helen?” said Clay Varron, with a laugh. “You have your nerve with you. Do you realize that that means a mile and a half a minute?”

“I know the multiplication table, Clay,” she rejoined. “If it _is_ the multiplication table you compute it by. Anyhow, I have driven sixty miles on a road, and I don’t think speed would ever scare me very badly.”

“That’s so,” agreed Lawrence K. Ranfelt boisterously. “By George, Clay, I’d rather trust Helen in a race than a lot of men I know. I’d like to see her in a car against Victor Burnham. I bet she’d make Vic hustle.”

Helen Ranfelt frowned and pinched her father’s arm.

“Was it necessary to bring Mr. Burnham’s name into this?” she asked, in a whisper. “I want to forget him.”

“If you do, you’d better root for Mr. Downs to pull off the race. You know what Burnham expects if he brings the Columbiad in first.”

“What he expects and what he will get may be widely apart, dad,” returned the girl, in her usual tone, and with a carcass laugh and toss of her head. “Anyhow, I’m expecting to see the Thunderbolt do it easily.”

“We shall get a line on it at the trial to-morrow,” observed Varron. “I suppose you haven’t any doubt about it yourself—have you, Stan?”

Stanley Downs smiled, as he patted the gray monster, with its immense white “5” on the front of the radiator, and repeated in three other places, on each side of the hood and at the back.

“I’m ready to guarantee that the Thunderbolt is in perfect condition to-night,” he said. “That means it will be the same in the morning, for it will be shut up here by the garage men after we’ve gone, and no one else will see it till I come down here to drive it to the speedway.”

“You’ll drive it through the city yourself, then?” asked Varron.

“Certainly. It is the safest thing to do.”

“How do you feel yourself?” asked Mr. Ranfelt, slapping him on the shoulder. “Think you are fit?”

“Seem to be,” replied Stanley, as the party filed out of the room and went down the stairs on their way to the street.

“Now, Hank,” said the man he had called Bill. “If you want to take a flash at the Thunderbolt, now is your time.”

Hank Swartz walked over to the racer, over which a bunch of electric lights still glowed, and bent down to look at her closely.

This man had owned several cars in his life, and he knew the “points” of an automobile. So his examination of the Thunderbolt was an intelligent one, even though he was not long making it.

“Well?” queried Bill, as Swartz at last moved away from the Thunderbolt. “What do you think of her?”

Hank Swartz drew a long breath. Then he shook his head slowly.

“She is unbeatable—as she stands to-night,” he answered.

He went out of the garage, boarded a street car at a near corner, and sent his name up to a certain room in a prominent hotel.

“Mr. Burnham is out,” announced the clerk, when the telephone had failed to draw a response from the room.

Swartz frowned impatiently. Then he hastily wrote his name on a card and handed it to the clerk. On the card he had also written: “Call me up right away. Important. Trouble.”

“See that Mr. Burnham gets this card as soon as he returns, please,” he requested, as he turned away from the desk.

He strode up and down the spacious lobby several times, thinking, and muttering to himself. What he said was: “The Thunderbolt is unbeatable. I said it and I sincerely meant it. Unbeatable—unless——Well, that will be up to Burnham.”

He walked out of the hotel, still thinking and muttering.