"Now, ladies, you are all right," I said, trying to keep cheerful. "And I am so glad none of you was hurt."
Then one of them drawled, but looking over toward the distant horizon, "Ain't you named Mister Jack?"
I turned red and pleaded guilty.
"After all you've writ, I don't think you had oughter done this," she said, and then they all drove sedately off, still looking toward the horizon.
"Now that's the worst thing about automobiles," said Horace, after we started again, "these fool country horses. Why, I waited till this time of day, thinking they'd all be in town by now, for they get up with the chickens. Anyway, we're not likely to meet any more of them."
"I hope not," I sighed, pulling out a cigar and a match, as I'd always done in the buggy. It was blown out before the sulphur burned.
"You can't do that in an automobile," he yelled, "we're going too fast. Like to stop for you, but we're fairly humming—be there in half an hour, old man." Honk! Honk!
We had turned a bend in the road.
"Great Cæsar!" I shouted. "Nobody going to town! Look!"
His jaws dropped. There they were. We could see for half a mile, and so help me heaven, but this was the procession that passed as we pulled out of the narrow pike on the roadside, consumed with impatience to get to the field, the machine throbbing beneath us like a loft over a barn dance: