“I guess not,” I assented somewhat dubiously, however. “That was a rail fence we took a pull at back in the lane, wasn’t it? Of course, if we shouldn’t happen to clear the stone fence as well as we did the rail fence, it might be more disastrous.”
“Oh, land!” he said with a cackling laugh, “I ain’t meanin’ that kind of a fence. I mean the kind you––Say! You ain’t one of them teetotalers, be you?”
“Only in theory,” I replied, “but this stone fence drink is a new one on me. What’s it like?”
He stopped the “autoo” and pulled a bottle from an inner pocket.
“You kin taste it better than I kin tell it,” he declared. “Take a pull––a condumned good one.”
I rarely imbibed, confining my indulgences to the demands of necessity, but I thought that the flight of Ptolemy, the ghostly encounter, and my Mazeppa––wild ride all combined to constitute an occasion adequate to call for a bracer in the shape of a stone fence, or anything he might produce.
I took what I considered a “condumned good one” from the bottle and it nearly strangled me, but I followed the aged stranger’s advice to take another to “cure the chokes” caused by the first one. On general principles I took a third and then reluctantly returned him the bottle.
“Here’s over the moon,” he jovially 118 exclaimed as he proceeded to make my attempt at a “condumned good one” appear most niggardly.
“May I ask,” I inquired when my feeling of nerve-tense strain had vanished, and I felt as if I were treading thin air, “just what is in a stone fence?”