Graves nodded and the car leaped to forty-five miles an hour. “I have a special arrangement with Graves,” Dan continued, turning to Maisie as calmly as if his heart were beating at its normal rate of seventy-six, full and strong. “Unless instructions to the contrary are given him, his orders from me are to obey the traffic laws. If he is arrested in the absence of such instructions to the contrary, he pays his own fine. Under any other circumstances, I pay it.”
“Fair enough,” Maisie answered, with a near approach to slang which, coming from her, was rather delightful. To herself she said: “What a charming old idiot he is! I’ve gotten him quite fussed and he is in a hurry to get back to the hotel so he can go to his room and sulk. Well, he almost proposed that time. I wonder if I wasn’t just a little bit too feminine with him. I had an opportunity and failed to take advantage of it. . . . Oh well, he shall propose again before the night is over, and this time. . .”
Dan was humming a crazy little lumber-jack song:
Oh, the Olson boys they built a shingle mill,
They built it up on the side of a hill,
They worked all night and they worked all day,
And they tried to make the old mill pay.
And—by heck—they couldn’t!
So the Olson boys just took that shingle mill,
And turned it into a whisky still;