the size of a barn door. It was my third or fourth time behind the lever of the busy barouche, but I was wise that you pulled the plug this way when you wanted it to go ahead, and you shoved it back when you wanted it to stop. When it came to benzine buggies I felt that my education was complete. I was George Gazazza, the real Rolando, when I pulled up in front of my lady friend's front gate. My market price was $18,000 a square inch. In six minutes by the watch Clara Jane was down and in the kerosene caravan. Clarence hadn't arrived. Somebody must have put him next, but I knew where he lived and I figured it out that after we came back from Lonely Lane I'd send the landau around and around the block he camped in till I made him dizzy. Clara Jane was the feature of the game. She was the limit in ladies' dress goods. For a chaser she wore one of those feather boas that feel cool because they look so warm. 

[Illustration: "For a chaser she wore one of those feather boas."] 

Well, I turned the horseless gag into the shell road and cut loose. We were doing about 43 miles an hour and the birdies were singing on the way. Clarence Edgerton Montrose was working in Shaft No. 3, back in the mines--my lady friend told me so. She was having the time of her life. I was her candy boy for sure. Just then something snapped and the machine started for Portland, Maine, on the basis of a mile in eight seconds. Clara Jane grabbed me around the neck and I grabbed the lever. "The eccentric has buckled the thingamajig!" I yelled, pushing the lever over to stop the carryall. The thing gave me the horse laugh, jumped over a telegraph pole, bit its way through a barb-wire fence and then started down the road at the rate of 2,000,000 miles a minute. "Why don't you stop it?" screamed my lady friend. "I'll be the goat; what's the answer?" I said, clawing the lever and ducking the low bridges. We met a man on a bicycle and the last I saw of him as we whizzed by he had found a soft spot in a field about four blocks away and he was going into it head first. We kept his bicycle and carried it along on our smoke stack. I couldn't stop the thing to save my life. Every time I yanked the lever the snap would let a chortle out of its puzzle department and fly 400 feet straight through the air. We were headed for an old ash heap, and my market price had gone down to three cents a ton. "Don't jump!" I yelled to my lady friend, but the wind whisked the first half of my sentence away. Clara Jane gathered her skirts in a bunch and did a flying leap out of the crazy cab. She landed right in the middle of that heap of fresh ashes--and she made good. All I could see was a great, gray cloud as I 

 Prev. P 13/30 next