trailer banged and crackled. The crowd divided itself into an outer circle of critics, advisers, and secondary characters, who had played undistinguished parts or no parts at all in the affair, and a central group of heated and distressed principals. A young man with an inquiring mind and a considerable knowledge of motor-bicycles fixed on to Grubb and wanted to argue that the thing could not have happened. Grubb wass short and inattentive with him, and the young man withdrew to the back of the crowd, and there told the benevolent old gentleman in the silk hat that people who went out with machines they didn't understand had only themselves to blame if things went wrong.
The old gentleman let him talk for some time, and then remarked, in a tone of rapturous enjoyment: “Stone deaf,” and added, “Nasty things.”
A rosy-faced man in a straw hat claimed attention. “I DID save the front wheel,” he said; “you'd have had that tyre catch, too, if I hadn't kept turning it round.” It became manifest that this was so. The front wheel had retained its tyre, was intact, was still rotating slowly among the blackened and twisted ruins of the rest of the machine. It had something of that air of conscious virtue, of unimpeachable respectability, that distinguishes a rent collector in a low neighbourhood. “That wheel's worth a pound,” said the rosy-faced man, making a song of it. “I kep' turning it round.”
Newcomers kept arriving from the south with the question, “What's up?” until it got on Grubb's nerves. Londonward the crowd was constantly losing people; they would mount their various wheels with the satisfied manner of spectators who have had the best. Their voices would recede into the twilight; one would hear a laugh at the memory of this particularly salient incident or that.
“I'm afraid,” said the gentleman of the motor-car, “my tarpaulin's a bit done for.”
Grubb admitted that the owner was the best judge of that.
“Nothin, else I can do for you?” said the gentleman of the motor-car, it may be with a suspicion of irony.
Bert was roused to action. “Look here,” he said. “There's my young lady. If she ain't 'ome by ten they lock her out. See? Well, all my money was in my jacket
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