We gave her a dollar and the others a quarter each. It was expensive, but I deemed it just.
The following then passed with more or less hesitancy, shying and plunging: a surrey and team; a boy and his best girl; a log wagon and four mules, the leaders rushing by in terror, pulling the wheelers by the neck, as they were trying to go the other way.
Then came Old 'Squire Jones on his roan Hal pacer. The horse got half-way by before he decided that the goggle eyes on the roadside had him. Well—no goggle eyes had ever caught any of his tribe—not yet! In bucking to wheel, he tapped the old 'Squire in the mouth with his poll. The old man had been raised a Presbyterian, with Baptist propensities, and he made the ozone sulphuric. He brought his horse back to the scratch, spurring and swearing. It was all right this time, till the old horse looked into the back of the machine. True to the fool in his pedigree, he knew what the machine was, because he had never seen one before; but the dogs—they were things he had seen all his life, and he bolted backward again, jamming the old 'Squire's stomach against the pommel and his back against the cantle. It was the time to go, and we shot out, leaving the old horse waltzing into town on his hind legs.
"I didn't hear his last remarks," I said, as we went along. "They seemed to be rather personal."
"Let 'em go," said Horace. "You wouldn't want to put them in your scrap-book."
"I don't think the mare and buggy would have made us all these enemies," I remarked, "and we would have been there by now. Do you know it's eleven o'clock?"
"We've got a fine run, now," he apologized. "We'll be there in thirty minutes."
"We'll be there by night," I snarled. "Say, we'll just call it a possum hunt, eh?"
This made him mad, and he did not speak till he got to the big hill.
Here at the foot we stopped and sat, throbbing.