"Only five miles to go!" sings out Barry at last, along about three o'clock. "Now, Ann, it's nearly time for you to be saying a few kind words to Adelbaran and me."
"I'll be thinking them up," says Ann.
Perhaps she did. I can't say. For it was somewhere in the middle of the second or third hill after this that the little roadster began to splutter and cough like it had swallowed a monkey wrench.
"Come, come now, Adelbaran!" says Barry coaxin'. "Don't go misbehaving at this late hour. Remember the women singing in the tents, the palm waving over the——"
"Barry," says Ann, "something has gone wrong with your engine."
"Say not so," says Barry, steppin' on the accelerator careless.
"But I'm sure!" says Ann. "There!"
With a final cough the thing has quit cold. All Barry can seem to do though is to jiggle the spark and look surprised. "Why—why, that's odd!" says he.
"Yes, but sitting here isn't going to help," says Miss McLeod. "Get out and see what's happened. Come on."
And while she's liftin' the hood and pawin' around among the wires and things, with Barry lookin' on puzzled and helpless, I sort of wanders about inspectin' Adelbaran curious. It's some relic, all right, and my guess is that it was assembled by a cross-eyed mechanic from choice pieces he rescued off'm a scrap heap. All of a sudden I notices something peculiar.