"I like to go fast. My brother takes it at sixty."
That, so far as I was concerned, was youthful exaggeration. I was busy
telling her all the perils of fast driving when a rabbit came barrelling
out of the bushes along one side and streaked across in front of me.
I twitched the wheel. The car went out of the narrow road and up on the
shoulder, tilting quite a bit. Beyond the rabbit I swung back into the
road, but not before the youngster had grabbed my arm to keep from being
tossed all over the front seat.
Her grip was like a hydraulic vise. My arm went numb and my fingers went
limp on the wheel. I struggled with my left hand to spin the wheel to
keep on the narrow, winding road and my foot hit the brake to bring the
car down, but fast.
Taking a deep breath as we stopped, I shook my right hand by holding it
in my left at the wrist. I was a mass of tingling pins and needles
because she had grabbed me just above the elbow. It felt as though it
would have taken only a trifle more to pinch my arm off and leave me
with a bloody stump.
"Sorry, mister," she said breathlessly, her eyes wide open. Her face was
white around the corners of the mouth and at the edges of her nose. The
whiteness of the flesh under the deep tan gave her a completely
frightened look, far more than the shake-up could have produced.