“Too fast for you?” Cliff asked once, and Johnny felt the little tolerant smile he could not see.

“Too fast?  Say, I’m used to flying!” Johnny shouted back, ready to die rather than own the tingling of his scalp for fear.  He expected Cliff to let her out still more, after that tacit dare, but Cliff did not for two reasons:  he was already going as fast as he could and keep the road, and he was convinced that Johnny Jewel had hardened every nerve in his system with skyriding.

Oceanside was but a sprinkle of lights and a blur of houses when they slipped through at slackened speed, lest their passing be noted curiously and remembered too well.  On again, over the upland and down once more to the very sand where the waves rocked and boomed under the stars.  Up and around and over and down—­Johnny wondered how much farther they would hurl themselves through the night.  Straight out along a narrow streak of asphalt toward lights twinkling on a blur of hillside.  Up and around with a skidding turn to the right, and Del Mar was behind them.  Down and around and along another straight line next the sands, and up a steep grade whose windings slowed even this brute of a car to a saner pace.

“This is Torrey Pine grade,” Cliff informed him.  “It isn’t much farther to the next stop.  I’ve been making time, because from San Diego on we have rougher going.  This is not the most direct route we could have taken, but it’s the best, seeing I have to stop in San Diego and complete certain arrangements.  And then, too, it is not always wise to take a direct route to one’s destination.  Not—­always.”  He slowed for a rickety bridge and added negligently, “We’ve made pretty fair time.”

“I’d say we have.  You’ve been doing fifty part of the time.”

“And part of the time I haven’t.  From here on it’s rough.”

From there on it was that, and more.  There had been a rain storm which the asphalt had long forgotten but the dirt road recorded with ruts and chuck-holes half filled with mud.  The big car weathered it without breaking a spring, and before the tiredest laborer of San Diego had yawned and declared it was bedtime, they chuckled sedately into San Diego and stopped on a side street where a dingy garage stood open to the greasy sidewalk.

Cliff turned in there and whistled.  A lean figure in grease-blackened coveralls came out of the shadows, and Cliff climbed down.

“I want to use your ’phone a minute.  Go over the car, will you, until I come back.  Where can I spot her—­out of the way?”

The man waved a hand toward a space at the far end, and Cliff returned to his seat and dexterously placed the car, nose to the wall.

“You may as well stay right here.  I’ll not be gone long.  You might curl down and take a nap.”