"You got it," said Sharon. "Spend all your born days on the old cadaver if you're so minded." Already to Sharon it was an old car. He turned away from the ghastly sight, but stopped for a final warning: "But don't you ever tell anybody. I ain't wanting this to get out on me."
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
"Maybe we ought to——" began Sharon, but broke off his speech with a hearty cough. He was embarrassed, because he had been on the point of suggesting that they call Doc Mumford. Doc Mumford was the veterinary. The old man withdrew. Elihu Titus appeared dimly in the background.
"Ain't she one gosh-awful crazy hellion?" he called softly to Wilbur, and returned to the horse, whose mechanism was understandable.
The boy was left sole physician to the ailing monster. He drew a long breath of gloating and fell upon it. For three days he lived in grimed, greased, and oiled ecstasy, appeasing that sharp curiosity to know what was inside of things. The first day he took down the engine bit by bit. The clean-swept floor about the dismantled hulk was a spreading turmoil of parts. Sharon, on cool afterthought, had conceived that his purchase might not have suffered beyond repair, but returning to survey the wreck, had thrown up his fat hands in a gesture of hopeless finality.
"That does settle it," he murmured. He pointed to the scattered members. "How in time did you ever find all them fiddlements in that little space?" Of course no one could ever put them back.
He picked up the book that had come with the car, a book falsely pretending to elucidate its mechanism, even to minor intelligences. The book was profuse in diagrams, and each diagram was profuse in letters of the alphabet, but these he found uninforming. For the maker of the car had unaccountably neglected to put A, B, or C on the parts themselves, which rendered the diagrams but maddening puzzles. He threw down the book, to watch the absorbed young mechanic who was frankly puzzled but still hopeful.
"It's an autopsy," said Sharon. He fled again, in the buggy drawn by the roan. "A fool and his money!" he called from the sagging seat.
The second day passed with the parts still spread about the floor. Elihu Titus told Sharon the boy was only playing with them. Sharon said he was glad they could furnish amusement, and mentally composed the beginning of what would be a letter of withering denunciation to the car's maker.
But the third day the parts were unaccountably reassembled. Elihu Titus admitted that every one of them was put back, though he hinted they were probably by no means where they had been. But Sharon, coming again to the dissecting room at the day's end, was stricken with awe for the astounding genius that had put back all those parts. He felt a gleam of hope.