Billy Winthrop drives his friends to the Harvard–Yale game in his scarlet touring car — among them Miss Forbes, whom he loves, and Peabody, who is engaged to her — and before the road to New Haven is done they have become jail-breakers, trespassers and kidnappers. Three more stories complete the book: My Buried Treasure, The Consul and The Lost House. Davis was the most famous reporter of his age and the model Charles Dana Gibson drew for the Gibson Man; the title story, of 1907, caught the automobile at the moment it was still an adventure in itself. Fifty-seven plates of painting by Munch and Sloan, from The Girls on the Bridge to The City from Greenwich Village, catch the same restless, open-road spirit that drives the scarlet car.
