But to our surprise he was as nice as pie. Either he had completely forgiven us, we decided, or in some dumb way had failed to catch on. So it wasn’t hard for us to put away our uneasiness. More than that, in our happy-go-lucky way, we brought out a pair of perfectly good grins. And to that point, I don’t know how any kid with fun in him could have ridden beside that old geezer without grinning. Say, that was some ride. First a tree would jump at us out of the darkness, then the corner of a house, then a hunk of sidewalk. It was a lucky thing for all of us that the whole town was asleep. For otherwise we might have been jailed for intoxicated driving, or whatever you call it—like the time back home when Paddy Gorbett drove into the Presbyterian church and started bawling the minister out because the garage was full of pews.
To a rosy view of things, how handy old Goliath would be, we thought, if the Galloping Snail got another balky spell. Big as he was, he could push beautifully. If necessary, with so much muscle, he could make the old engine zip whether it wanted to or not. So it couldn’t put anything over on us. We really were lucky in having him along, we concluded. And most wonderful of all, we had saved our two dollars, though not in the way we had schemed. To this point, however, as you will see, our joy soon lost its jiggles. Like the man with the nest of rotten eggs, we had counted our savings before they were hatched.
Having navigated into one end of Main Street and out the other, without upsetting anything any bigger than the car itself, the driver suddenly remembered that he had a duty to perform and stopped outside of town.
“Boys,” says he in that deep drawl of his, “we want to be fair an’ square. Fur in startin’ out in any undertakin’, this ’un unexcepted, a feller never gits very far who isn’t fair an’ square.”
“Meaning which?” says Poppy suspiciously.
“We owe the town two dollars. An’ it’s our bounden duty to pay it. Then we kin leave here with a clear conscience.”
“Forget about your conscience,” says Poppy quickly, “and throw in the clutch.”
“No, I kain’t do that. In runnin’ away from my wife, I’ll have enough on my mind without wantin’ my conscience to further prick me in the thought that, through me, these pore suckers, who don’t git six square meals a year, was cheated out of eight good soup bones.”
The upper deck nudged me.
“I know a good scheme, Mr. Goliath.”