“Suspect what?” I asked.
“Suspect where we got it,” he explained.
“Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature,” I said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was getting restless by this time.
“But you’ve included yourself in the secret,” he tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. “And surely, after you’ve wormed that out of me, you’re not going to deliver a poor devil over to—”
“You can have perfect confidence in me,” I interrupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I’m afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed in a companionable and laisser-faire sort of way as he started his engine and took command of the wheel.
Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.
The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.
“The wages of sin is mud,” he said as I trotted up to him. “And how much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I’d never taken that car!”
The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should try to make allowances for.
“It would have been much better,” I agreed, wondering how long it would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.