Then one of them drawled, but looking over toward the distant horizon:
“Ain’t you named Mister Trotwood?”
I turned red and pleaded guilty.
“After all you’ve writ, I don’t think you had oughter done this,” and they all drove sedately off, still looking toward the horizon.
“Now, that’s the worst thing about automobiles,” said Horatius, after we started again—“these fool country horses. Why, I waited till this time of day, thinking they’d all be in town by now, for they get up with the chickens. Anyway, we are not likely to meet any more of them.”
“I hope not,” I sighed, pulling out a cigar and a match. I struck the match, as I’d always done in the buggy. It was blown out before the sulphur burned.
“You can’t do that in an automobile,” he yelled; “we’re going too fast. Like to stop for you, but we’re fairly humming—be there in half an hour, old man.” Honk! honk!
We had turned a bend in the road.
“Great Caesar!” I shouted. “Nobody going to town! Look!”
His jaws dropped. There they were. We could see for half a mile, and so help me heaven, but this was the procession that passed as we pulled out of the narrow pike on the roadside, consumed with impatience to get to the field, the machine throbbing beneath us like a loft over a bran dance.