On the side of the road an overgrown boy of eighteen hopped wildly on one foot, the other stretched at right angles in front of him, while his lank red wrists beat the air like the arms of a windmill. 

These apparently purposeless evolutions he performed mechanically so long as his ungainly figure filled their vision, and the 52 maniac appearance of the yokel rasped Antony's over-strained nerves unendurably. 

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"If that is a fair sample of Huntersville youth, it would be a real blessing to the community to murder a few," he muttered malevolently, as they dashed, at what seemed to him a terribly accelerated pace, into the little town. A large sign-board sprang up suddenly, as it seemed, and faced them. 

Village limits. Slow down to six miles an hour (it read) by order of Commissioners. Offenders Will be---- 

But Antony, though desirous of reading further, even at the cost of a halt, was unable to do so. 

It was high noon and the main artery of travel could not have assumed a condition more favourable to an unwilling excursionist. Save for a group of children, which scattered to safety at 53 the steady warning of the horn, and a laggard team of greys, whose languid progress from the middle of the road to their legitimate anchorage at the side cost their master his hind wheel, only a pompous speckled hen disputed their right of way. To his companion's shriek of horror--"The hen! The hen, Mr. Tony!"--Antony replied only, through set teeth, "This is no time to think of hens-- blow that horn!" and drove like Attila the implacable over whatever of domesticity and motherhood that obstinate fowl may have represented. One more heap of empty barrels making a treacherous curve, one more angry woman, leaping into a puddle to protect her wide-eyed urchin, one heart-stifling ne'er-do-weel lurching at the last possible quarter-second with drunken luck, out of destruction's way, and it was over: Antony, firmly convinced 54 that his hair must be snowy white, suffered the pent-up breath to escape at last from his lungs, only to catch it desperately again as a burly man, whose ostentatiously drawn-back coat displayed a gleaming metal badge, stood deliberately before them, not a hundred feet away, and waved his hand with unmistakable meaning. In this hand fluttered a bit of yellow paper which recalled irresistible memories of the telegraph office; the other grasped a large nickel watch that winked derisively in the sunlight. 

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