“But how?” demanded Marty, grinning. “Going to take a correspondence school course and learn to be a shuffer?”
“Oh!” cried Janice. “It has a self-starter. Why! it’s just the very up-to-datest thing!”
“Crackey! I’m going to run and git some gasoline. They keep it up the street. Let’s fill the tank, Janice, start her going, and try to work our passage up to the house.”
“Oh, Marty! I hardly dare,” gasped the girl, yet tempted sorely to try his desperate suggestion.
“Get the gasoline, anyway,” urged Marty.
“All right,” she agreed, and took out her purse and handed him some money. “You get it, Marty. But, after we get the engine to running, I don’t see what we shall do. Isn’t there a single person in town who knows how to manage an automobile?”
“I say!” exclaimed Marty suddenly. “I bet I know just the feller.”
“Who is that?” queried his cousin anxiously.
But the boy was off with a yell and without other reply. Meanwhile Walky and other willing workers had rolled the machine into the freight shed, and there it stood, the cynosure of the spectators in general.
The comments upon the first auto to be owned in Polktown would have amused Janice at another time. But many of them escaped her ear because she was so much interested herself in the machine and how she was going to get it home. But she did hear Mel Parraday observe: