Her Reputation by Talbot Mundy

It cost Sherry exactly twenty minutes to cross town to the garage where he kept his own car, to put in gas and to be under way again. But Wahl lost fifteen minutes asking for directions and procuring a road map; and Sherry's car could overhaul Wahl's cheap roadster at the rate of almost two to one. Nothing but traffic and the speed-laws made a real race of it, but the luck was with Wahl from the start; perhaps because his car looked incapable of high speed, he slipped away unnoticed, whereas Sherry was held up twice in the first ten miles and served with notice to appear before the judge; each of those interludes cost him several minutes.

Thereafter Sherry "stepped on her" in real earnest. But the luck was still with Wahl. A bent nail punctured one of Sherry's rear tires, and he lost six more minutes changing rims -- made clumsy by darkness and his own impatience. By the time he had finished that job he knew by consulting his watch and figuring the mileage that it was a serious question whether he could catch Wahl before he reached the Mansfield cabin; the last twenty miles would be rough going over narrow dirt roads, on which high speed would be impossible. To make matters worse, he began to drive into a fog.