With a roar of laughter that waked the echoes in the surrounding hills, the disconcerting individual in the cart touched his horse with his whip and ambled down the road, calling over his shoulder:
“Tha’ be the fine comet, tha’ be. Tha’ be a real shootin’ star in the fir-ma-ment, I’m thinkin’. Tha’ flies, tha’ does.”
He roared again joyfully, as he jogged along, and Billie, half laughing and half exasperated, jumped out to see what the matter was.
“Everybody get out,” she ordered, while Feargus, well-trained in his duties as assistant chauffeur, lifted the cushion from the front seat and opened the tool box.
“I hope it won’t be a repetition of that awful night on the plains last summer, when the ‘Comet’ went to pieces so completely,” Miss Campbell remarked.
“Now, Cousin Helen, you know you enjoyed the night in the open,” called Billie, already enveloped in her repairing apron with the intention of crawling under the car.
But it did look as if history were going to repeat itself as time dragged slowly on; the shadows began to deepen; the air grew chilly and still the stubborn motor would not respond to treatment. Miss Campbell began to feel timid and anxious. Should she send Feargus for help at the next village or should they wait for a passing carter to take them all in, leaving the “Comet” to its fate?
Suddenly the stillness was broken by a familiar whir, and another motor car hove into view in the distance. Feargus, crawling from under the machine, ran to the middle of the road and waved his arms for the car to stop; but it did not even slow up, in spite of the etiquette which requires one motorist to help another, and Feargus had just time to leap out of the road as the great machine whizzed past.
“I’m glad it didn’t stop,” he announced calmly. “Do you know who the man was next the chauffeur? It was the Duke of Kilkenty. I’d sooner ask help of a carter than of him.”
“I wonder if he has found little Arthur yet?” observed Mary.