Now and then there are episodes in life which, when they are past and one comes to look back on them, seem more like dreams than actual occurrences. This matter of the Chinaman, the Eye of Buddha, the sailor, and the glass balls looked particularly unreal to Motor Matt and Joe McGlory.
When Matt opened his eyes, he found himself in a hammock. For a minute or two he lay quiet, trying to figure out how and when he had got into the hammock, and where Joe was, and just how much of a dream he had had.
The hammock was strung between a couple of trees, and from a distance came a subdued chatter of voices, and the low, soft strains of an orchestra.
Matt sat up in the hammock and looked in the direction from which the sounds came. The lofty, porticoed front of a huge hotel was no more than two hundred feet away. Men in flannels and women in lawn dresses were coming and going about the porticoes, and the music was wafted out from inside the building.
The young motorist's bewilderment grew, and he brushed a hand across his eyes. Then he looked in another direction. Two yards from the tree supporting one end of the hammock, the ground broke sharply into a precipitous descent, falling sheer away for a hundred feet or more. He could look off over a rolling country checkered with meadows and grainland and timber patches, with a river cutting through the vista and holding the scene together like a silver ribbon.
He drew a long breath, and swerved his gaze to the right. Here there was another hammock, one end of it secured to the same tree that helped support Matt's airy couch, and the other end to a third tree which formed an acute angle with respect to the other two.
In this second hammock was McGlory. Like Matt, he was sitting up; and, like Matt again, he was staring.
Leaning against one of the three trees, were the two motor cycles.
"Joe!" cried Matt. "Is that you?"
"Hooray!" exclaimed the cowboy, with sudden animation. "I was just waiting for you to speak, in order to make sure I wasn't still asleep. Jumpin' jee-whiskers, what a dream I've had!"