Then, thought Bell, all he had to do was learn to drive the thing before the race started. Or at least well enough to keep learning on the job, as he tracked Josephine across the country. By the time the race ended in San Francisco, he’d have gotten pretty good at it, and the first thing he would do was take Marion Morgan for a ride. The Eagle’s motor had plenty of extra power, Andy had told him, to carry a passenger. Marion could even bring a moving-picture camera. And wouldn’t that adventure be a wedding gift?

He watched Josephine disappear in the east. “All right, boys,” he told the Van Dorns, “stay here and wait for Josephine to come back. Stick close to her. If you need me, I’ll be over at the thermo engine.”

“Do you think Frost will attack here like he did before? He knows we’re primed.”

“He’s surprised us before. Stick close. I’ll come back before she lands.”

Bell walked across the infield to the three-hundred-foot-long steel rail on which Platov had promised his engine would race in a final experiment before they installed it in Steve Stevens’s biplane.

The enormously fat Stevens, bulging in a white planter’s suit and glowering impatiently, sat at a breakfast table that his elderly servants had set with linen and silver. Platov and Stevens’s chief mechanician were tinkering with the still-silent jet motor, the mechanician setting valves and switches while Platov consulted his slide rule. Stevens was venting his restlessness by upbraiding his servants. His coffee was cold, he was complaining. His sweet rolls were stale, and there weren’t enough of them. The docile old men attending the cotton planter looked terrified.

Stevens’s arrogant gaze fell on Bell’s white suit.

“Surely Southern blood courses in your veins, suh,” he drawled in dulcet Southern tones. “Ah have never laid eyes on a Yankee who could do justice to the pure white duds of the Old South.”

“My father spent time in the Old South.”

“And taught you to dress like a gentleman. Do Ah presume correctly that he was buyin’ cotton for New England mills?”

“He was a Union Army intelligence officer, carrying out President Lincoln’s order to free the slaves.”

“Ready, sirs,” Dmitri Platov called out.

The Russian inventor’s springy mutton-chop whiskers were quivering with excitement and his dark eyes were flashing.

“Thermo engine ready.”

Stevens glared at his chief mechanician. “Is it, Judd?”

Judd muttered, “Ready as it ever will be, Mr. Stevens.”

“About time. Ah’ve had just about enough sittin’ and waitin’ . . . Now, where you goin’?”

Judd had picked up a baseball bat and started walking along the rail. “I gotta whack the stop switch as she’s nearing the end to shut the motor off.”