Barney was pressing the accelerator downward to the limit.  The car responded nobly—­there was no sputtering, no choking.  Just a rapid rush of increasing momentum as the machine gained headway by leaps and bounds.

The bullets were ripping the air all about him.  Just ahead the second outpost stood directly in the center of the road.  There were three soldiers and they were taking deliberate aim, as carefully as though upon the rifle range.  It seemed to Barney that they couldn’t miss him.  He swerved the car suddenly from one side of the road to the other.  At the rate that it was going the move was fraught with but little less danger than the supine facing of the leveled guns ahead.

The three rifles spoke almost simultaneously.  The glass of the windshield shattered in Barney’s face.  There was a hole in the left-hand front fender that had not been there before.

“Rotten shooting,” commented Barney Custer, of Beatrice.

The soldiers still stood in the center of the road firing at the swaying car as, lurching from side to side, it bore down upon them.  Barney sounded the raucous military horn; but the soldiers seemed unconscious of their danger—­they still stood there pumping lead toward the onrushing Juggernaut.  At the last instant they attempted to rush from its path; but they were too late.

At over sixty miles an hour the huge, gray monster bore down upon them.  One of them fell beneath the wheels—­the two others were thrown high in air as the bumper struck them.  The body of the man who had fallen beneath the wheels threw the car half way across the road—­only iron nerve and strong arms held it from the ditch upon the opposite side.

Barney Custer had never been nearer death than at that moment—­not even when he faced the firing squad before the factory wall in Burgova.  He had done that without a tremor—­he had heard the bullets of the outpost whistling about his head a moment before, with a smile upon his lips—­he had faced the leveled rifles of the three he had ridden down and he had not quailed.  But now, his machine in the center of the road again, he shook like a leaf, still in the grip of the sickening nausea of that awful moment when the mighty, insensate monster beneath him had reeled drunkenly in its mad flight, swerving toward the ditch and destruction.

For a few minutes he held to his rapid pace before he looked around, and then it was to see two cars climbing into the road from the encampment in the field and heading toward him in pursuit.  Barney grinned.  Once more he was master of his nerves.  They’d have a merry chase, he thought, and again he accelerated the speed of the car.  Once before he had had it up to seventy-five miles, and for a moment, when he had had no opportunity to even glance at the speedometer, much higher.  Now he was to find the maximum limit of the possibilities of the brave car he had come to look upon with real affection.