Honk! Honk!
He was blowing for a stray mule to get out of his way.
The mule got, tail up, and settled into a barbed wire fence, which he tried to jump, but only succeeded in cutting up his countenance.
Honk! Honk! "Get out of the way, if that's all the sense, you've got. My! but ain't we buzzing?"
I nodded, beginning to become exhilarated myself.
"This is pretty good," I admitted. "I begin to see how you people soon become speed-crazy. We'll get the birds to-day," I warmed up, "and I thank you for—look out! Stop!"
He stopped, but not in time. It was a nervous-looking, old, fleabitten, gray mare, full of Stackpole, Traveler, Dan Rice and Boston blood. I had seen it so often that I knew the very turn of its tail. In the buckboard she was pulling were three country girls, fat, solid, happy, their lines wabbling around anywhere, and the old mare going where she listeth. They were the kind of girls I knew and loved in my sappy days. I used to commence to kiss 'em about Christmas, knowing they'd wake up and respond about the Fourth of July. Two of them amply filled up the buckboard, but, as usual, a third one had piled on top of the others somewhere, and—
"Great heaven, Horace!" I shouted. "Stop—that one there on top is holding a baby!"
I sprang out, for I saw the old mare begin to squat, her old, scared, brown eyes blazing in her white face like holes in a big lard can. I heard her snort like a scared bear and saw her feet pattering jigs all over the pike. Then she whirled, running into a fence, where, between the overturned buckboard, the shafts and the rail fence, she stood wedged upon her hind legs, pawing the air.
But the girls surprised me. Without a change in their fat, immutable, expressionless faces, they simply rolled out on the pike in a bunch, the baby on top, like snow folks tilted over by a boy.