“You never in your life heard such a row as there was in that wagon. Clarissa and me yellin’ to Lonesome to keep off—forgittin’ that he was stone deef and dumb—and James vowin’ that he was goin’ to be slaughtered in cold blood. And the Greased Lightnin’ p’inted jest so she’d split that cart amidships, and comin’—well, you know how she can go.
“She never budged until she was within ten foot of the flat, and then, jest as I was commencin’ the third line of ‘Now I lay me,’ she sheered off and went past in a wide curve, with Lonesome steerin’ with one hand and shakin’ his pitchfork at Todd with t’other. And such faces as he made up! They’d have got him hung in any court in the world.
“He run up the ‘Cut-Through’ a little ways, and then come about, and back he comes again, never slackin’ speed a mite, and runnin’ close to the shoal as he could shave, and all the time goin’ through the bloodiest kind of pantomimes. And past he goes, to wheel ’round and commence all over again.
“Thinks I, ‘Why don’t he ease up and lay us aboard? He’s got all the weapons there is. Is he scart?’
“And then it come to me—the reason why. He didn’t know how to stop her. He could steer fust rate, bein’ used to sailboats, but an electric auto launch was a new deal for him, and he didn’t understand her works. And he dastn’t run her aground at the speed she was makin’; ’twould have finished her and, more’n likely, him, too.
“I don’t s’pose there ever was another mess jest like it afore or sence. Here was us, stranded with a horse we couldn’t make go, bein’ chased by a feller who was run away with in a boat he couldn’t stop!
“Jest as I’d about give up hope, I heard somebody callin’ from the beach behind us. I turned, and there was Becky Huckleberries, Lonesome’s daughter. She had the dead decoys by the legs in one hand.
“‘Hi!’ says she.
“‘Hi!’ says I. ‘How do you git this giraffe of yours under way?’
She held up the decoys.