"A compound fracture of the right arm," he replied. "It wasn't a pleasing break; but it was a good deal more pleasing than the way it happened."
"How was that?" Billy looked up expectantly, for the young man's tone was suggestive of a story yet untold.
Gifford Barrett laughed.
"It was very absurd, very ignominious; but the fact is, I was run into by a woman, one day in a pelting shower, and knocked heels over head off my bicycle."
Sitting in the doorway, Phebe had been holding a book in her hands. Now it fell to the floor with a crash.
"Drop something, Babe?" Hubert asked amicably.
"Yes, my book," she answered shortly.
"I shall never forget my emotions at the time," Gifford Barrett was saying to Billy. "I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower. The road was all up and down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the other. She had lost both her pedals, and you've no idea how she looked, bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind. She hadn't even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn't an atom of romance in the affair from first to last. She was a great, overgrown country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and arms and a skull. What do you suppose she could have been doing with them? She was too young and fair to have been an undertaker."
"They might have belonged to her ancestors, and she have been taking them home for burial," Hubert suggested.
Mr. Barrett chuckled in a manner which suggested the composer in him had not entirely ousted the boy.