"So I guess they went up to the Heatherbloom Inn," the carriage agent said.
Once more Morris darted away without waiting to thank his informant, and again he climbed into the tonneau of the machine.
"Do you know where the Heatherbloom Inn is?" he asked the chauffeur.
"What you tryin' to do?" the chauffeur commented. "Kid me?"
"I ain't trying to do nothing," Morris explained. "I ask it you a simple question: Do you know where the Heatherbloom Inn is?"
"Say! do you know where Baxter Street is?" the chauffeur asked, and then without waiting for an answer he opened the throttle and they glided around the corner into Fifth Avenue. It was barely half-past twelve and the tide of fashionable traffic had not yet set in. Hence the motor car made good progress, nor was it until Fiftieth Street was reached that a
block of traffic caused them to halt. An automobile had collided with a delivery wagon, and a wordy contest was waging between the driver of the wagon, the chauffeur, one of the occupants of the automobile and a traffic-squad policeman.
"You don't know your business," a loud voice proclaimed, addressing the policeman. "If you did you wouldn't be sitting up there like a dummy already. This here driver run into us. We didn't run into him."
It was the male occupant of the automobile that spoke, and in vain did his fair companion clutch at the tails of the linen duster that he wore; he was in the full tide of eloquence and thoroughly enjoying himself.
The mounted policeman maintained his composure—the calm of a volcano before its eruption, the ominous lull that precedes the tornado.