“Egzackly,” said Eli, with an air of innocent triumph. “I’ve drove over this road so often, I can time the trip to a minute. You said you wanted to be here egzackly at four o’clock—”
“Four devils!” Hodges yelled. “I said four hours! I’m two hours late. I’ll have to stay in this jay town a whole day!”
“My, my!” exclaimed old Eli. “Somebody’s made a terrible mistake. I do hope I wasn’t in no way to blame for it. Now, if you’d just mentioned that you was behind time, I could easy have put them grays through two hours earlier.”
“Oh, it’s my fault, I guess,” said Hodges, when his wrath had subsided. “I told old Elrod, but I ought to have told you, too. Then I rode along for four mortal hours sucking that bottle of foolkiller, and didn’t have sense enough to look at my watch once. Well, well! I’ll just charge it up to Hodges, and see it don’t happen again.”
Though Eli was not to blame, he was inconsolable, till Hodges gave him a dollar at parting. Tears of gratitude stood in the old man’s eyes.
“Good-bye, Stranger,” he said. “I do hope old man Elrod won’t find out about you bein’ late. He’d be powerful pestered to know you’d been disappointed. Good-bye.” And as he drove away, he muttered to himself: “Darn the feller! I think he might have offered to fill my bottle.”
The modern lecturer is the alarm clock of civilization wound up to go off with a whiz and a bang at any hour in the evening, according to the whims of his audience. A Northern audience wants to be aroused at 8 P.M. sharp, a Southern audience anywhere between 8.30 P.M. and daylight, A.M. But some time in the night he is sure to wake the natives, for he is a traveling gesture tied to a bell clapper and
When his hands begin to swing
And his bell begins to ring
His waking listeners laugh and weep