The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Tom Burrill drew up in the shade at the side of the road, jumped from the car with a wrench in his hand and, lifting the hood, began to inspect the spark plugs.

He was a healthy, well-built, intelligent-looking boy of seventeen, with a lean, sunburned face. Clear gray eyes, a straight nose, a mouth that showed a sense of humor and a chin that indicated determination were his most noticeable features. He was tall for his years and had the look of one who spends much time out of doors.

The automobile deserves quite as full a description as its owner. It was small, low hung and light in weight—more a cycle car than a full-grown runabout—and was painted a bright red, all except the wheels, which were painted black. Its name was “Puff.” There was no doubt about the name, for it was conspicuously painted in black on the gasoline tank behind the seat.

Tom’s father had proposed calling the car “E Pluribus Unum,” since it was decidedly one out of many! Tom had built it himself; he had got the parts at secondhand—here, there and anywhere. The small, two-cylinder, twelve-horse-power engine that supplied the motive power Tom had picked up for a song at a repair shop in Kingston. The body he had built himself, and the engine hood he had had made at the local stamping works. You would never have suspected that under the two coats of brilliant red paint the hood was nothing more than a fair quality of zinc!

The car was air-cooled and chain-driven, and when Tom drove it over rough roads it rattled like half a dozen dish pans. But for all that it could do its thirty miles an hour, and perhaps better were it permitted to! Tom had spent most of his spare time that spring in building the car; but he had had a great deal of pleasure, to say nothing of his final triumph when he made his first trip through Kingston, to the confusion of the scoffers who had predicted failure!

But Puff had its troubles, just as larger and more expensive cars have theirs, and so far that summer much of its life had been spent in the stable, undergoing repairs. If the truth were told, however, Tom got almost as much pleasure out of Puff in the stable as he did out of Puff on the road, for he was never happier than when he was tinkering with machinery.

This morning he had overhauled the little car with more than ordinary care, for he was to make the run to Bristol and back, a matter of forty-eight miles all told. The trip was in the nature of a supreme test of Puff’s endurance. All had gone well until Kingston lay two miles behind. Then Puff had begun to skip and lose power, and Tom had at last been forced to investigate.

The investigation, however, was not very successful; both spark plugs were bright and appeared to be firing perfectly. With a puzzled shake of his head, Tom replaced them and began to survey the wiring. It was at this moment that a sound up the road toward home drew his attention. He had barely time to raise his head and look before a huge touring car raced past him in a cloud of dust.

Yet it did not travel so fast that Tom failed to identify the make. It was a Spalding of the latest model—a big, six-cylinder car painted battleship gray, with bright red wheels. In the big tonneau sat a single passenger, a man in a light gray overcoat and a cloth cap. The chauffeur was in brown livery. All this Tom saw before the car was lost to sight round a bend in the road. It did not, he was sure, belong in Kingston, for there was only one six-cylinder automobile in the town, and that was a Wright. Probably the car belonged in Bristol, for the Spalding factory was in that city. It was doubtless returning from a trip to Kingston, he concluded.