The trio by the spring stared for a few seconds as though they thought they must be dreaming, for it seemed utterly impossible that such a thing should come to pass. And yet there was the car hurrying along the road, with the fat scout clutching the steering wheel, and looking half scared to death as he tried to keep from running into the gullies that lay to the right and to the left!
CHAPTER XIII.
REPENTANT BUMPUS.
There was no mystery attached to it all, and Thad understood the whole occurrence as soon as he saw the car moving down the road with Bumpus in it. As usually happens, meddling was meeting with its customary reward.
Bumpus, as they very well knew, had long been desirous of learning how to run a motor car. Of course his father, being at the head of the Cranford bank, owned a big car, and had a chauffeur to run it; but he had issued positive orders that under no conditions was the boy to be allowed to ever handle the steering wheel. He knew Bumpus, and his capacity for doing the wrong thing, and meant to take no chances of having a smash-up.
Boys are human. What is denied them they most of all yearn to possess. Perhaps had Bumpus never been restrained from trying to run a car, his first little accident would have ended his vaulting ambition. As it was, this desire fed on the fact that it was a forbidden luxury for him.
When, therefore, Thad and the other two scouts were making their way toward the spring, with the intention of satisfying their thirst, he found himself tempted to clamber awkwardly over into the front seat, so as to sit there, and grasping the steering wheel try to imagine himself a bold chauffeur.
The engine was throbbing in restraint, and the trembling motion of the car gave Bumpus an additional opportunity to believe himself IT.
How he ever came to do it no one ever knew. Bumpus himself was so startled when he felt the car give a sudden leap forward that his wits almost left him. He always stoutly maintained that, so far as he could remember, he had done nothing at all to influence the start, but of course this was a mistake, for cars do not run away without some help.
Bumpus still gripped that wheel in a frenzied clutch. He stared hard at the road ahead, which to his excited fancy seemed to consist of a zigzag course as crooked as any wriggling snake he had ever watched.
At one second it seemed as though he were headed for the gully on the right, and no sooner had he wildly given the wheel a turn than the car, in sheer ugliness, Bumpus thought, started for the other side of the road.