The Motormaniacs | Page 6

won--which was me, naturally--and I had promised
aunt to be, oh, so careful, and papa that I'd cross my heart never to go
into stocks again, and rides, of course, to the guests, and everything to
everybody--then they all went back to breakfast while I had mine
brought out on the veranda--mine and the expert's--and I guess I talked
four speeds ahead while he ate his on the low gear--for he had come
ninety miles and wasn't much of a talker at any time--and I just sat
there and gloated over my Manton.
"We had a perfectly delirious week together--the expert and I --for the
Manton turned out perfectly splendid and everything they said it was,
except for the rear tires blowing up three times, and a short circuit in
the coil owing to a faulty condenser; and though it was all I could do to
hold it down on the low speeds, you ought to have seen me on the
forty-mile clip--till they said I'd have to go to prison for the next
offense without the option of a fine. The expert was one of the nicest
men you ever saw, and we used to take off cylinder heads, and adjust
cams, and spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them
together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without him.
He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you suppose he did?
I was lying under the machine at the time, studying the differential,
while he was jacking up an axle. Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut
and a cotter pin out of my mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it

over for about five minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I
must say he took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he
had been so patient in explaining things, and never got tired of being
asked the same question fifty times. He wiped his eyes with some
cotton waste and told me that even if years were to pass and oceans and
continents divide us, I had only to say 'come' and he'd come--that is, if I
ever got into real trouble with the Manton.
"When it came to saying good-by to him I let him take my cap as a
keepsake and accepted a dynamo igniter that he guaranteed not to burn
out the wires (though that's exactly what it did a week afterward) and it
was all too sad for anything. The governor, you know, that was
attached to the igniter, got stuck somehow, and of course the current
just sizzled up the plug. Then, when I had been running the machine for
about a week and doing splendidly with it, Captain Cartwright turned
up from Washington. I suppose I wasn't so pleased as I ought to have
been to see him, for though we were engaged and all that, there were
wheels within wheels and--you know how silly girls are and what fool
things they do, and Gerard Malcolm and the captain, to make matters
worse, talked a whole streak about good form, and how in England they
always walked their automobites, and how hateful anything like
speeding (and going to jail) was to a real English lady, and 'Oh, my
dear, would the Queen do it?' Can't you hear him? It goaded me into
saying awful things back, and when I took him out for his first spin, as
grumpy as only an Englishman can be after you've insulted him from
his hat to his boots, I just opened the throttle, threw in the high clutch,
and let her go. There were some things I liked about the captain, and
the best was that he didn't scare easy. He just folded his arms and never
wiggled an eyelash while I took some of the grades like the Empire
State Express.
"I knew he was boiling inside, in spite of his calm, British, new-washed
look, for I hadn't let him kiss me or anything, and nobody, however
brave he is, welcomes the idea of being squashed under a ton of old
iron. You see I was in a perfectly vicious humor, thinking what an
awful mistake I had made, and what a little fool I had been, and how if
it had only been Gerard Malcolm--and while my hands were clenched
on the steering-wheel I could see the mark of his horrid ring' sticking
through my gauntlets, and I wouldn't have cared two straws if I had

blown up a tire just then, and driven head-foremost through a stone
wall.
"I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when the
right-hand cylinder began to miss a little. Then, after a while, the left
started to skip, too.