eleven o'clock
`` Where would the damned race horses be now , '' he called , `` where would your Maud S. or your J.I.C. be , trying to catch up with me in this car ? '' Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn , tall now and in the light breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight , flashed past , looking like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of the child of some giant . The car ran through miles of the low farming country , through the main streets of towns , where the people ran out of the stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder , through sleeping bits of woodlands -- remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a boy -- and across wooden bridges over small streams , beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries , now yellow and fragrant with blossoms . At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turned the car back . Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanical triumphs of the age in which he had lived . `` I 've brought you whizzing along , you and Clara , '' he said proudly . `` I tell you what , Hugh , Steve Hunter and I have brought you along fast in more ways that one .