Charlie Sands looked at her with gloom.  “I shall have to send it myself, Aunt Tish,” he said; “it is my duty to my paper.  Even my family pride, hurt to the quick and quivering as it is, must not interfere with my duty.”

It was Bettina who suggested a way out—­Bettina, who had sat back as pale as Tish and heard that her Mr. Ellis was, as Charlie Sands said later, as crooked as a pretzel.

“But Jasper was not—­not subsidized,” she said.  “If he wins, it’s all right, isn’t it?”

The county detective turned to her.

“Jasper?” he said.

“A young man who lives here.”  Bettina colored.

“He is—­not to be suspected?”

“Certainly not,” said Bettina haughtily; “he is above suspicion.  Besides, he—­he and Mr. Ellis are not friends.”

Well, the county detective was no fool.  He saw the situation that minute, and smiled when he offered Bettina a peanut.  “Of course,” he said cheerfully, “if the race is won by a Morris Valley man, and not by one of the Ellis cars, I don’t suppose the district attorney would care to do anything about it.  In fact,” he said, smiling at Bettina, “I don’t know that I’d put it up to the district attorney at all.  A warning to Ellis would get him out of the State.”

It was just at that moment that car number thirteen, coming round the curve, skidded into the field, threw out both Jasper McCutcheon and his mechanician, and after standing on two wheels for an appreciable moment of time, righted herself, panting, with her nose against a post.

Jasper sat up almost immediately and caught at his shoulder.  The mechanician was stunned.  He got up, took a step or two and fell down, weak with fright.

I do not recall very distinctly what happened next.  We got out of the machine, I remember, and Bettina was cutting off Jasper’s sweater with Charlie Sands’ penknife, and crying as she did it.  And Charlie Sands was trying to prevent Jasper from getting back into his car, while Jasper was protesting that he could win in two or more laps and that he could drive with one hand—­he’d only broken his arm.

The crowd had gathered round us, thick.  Suddenly they drew back, and in a sort of haze I saw Tish in Jasper’s car, with Aggie, as white as death, holding to Tish’s sleeve and begging her not to get in.  The next moment Tish let in the clutch of the racer and Aggie took a sort of flying leap and landed beside her in the mechanician’s seat.

Charlie Sands saw it when I did, but we were both too late.  Tish was crossing the ditch into the track again, and the moment she struck level ground she put up the gasoline.

It was just then that Aggie fell out, landing, as I have said before, in a pile of sand.  Tish said afterward that she never missed her.  She had just discovered that this was not Jasper’s old car, which she knew something about, but a new racer with the old hood and seat put on in order to fool Mr. Ellis.  She didn’t know a thing about it.