I saw a big ditch on the other side of us. I saw his hand dart quickly to his side.
Like all man and woman-kind, in emergencies with a horse, I do the fool thing—grab at the reins. This instinct overpowered me. I grabbed the brakes to help him. I over-did it. It stopped so quickly it actually kicked up behind. It stopped like a twelve-inch ball striking armor plate. I went over clear across the ditch. The three dogs were faithful and they followed. Horatius tried it, but the steering wheel stopped him.
“It was my fault,” I said, as I limped up, after the dogs got off of me. “I grabbed at your reins, I guess—thought you were running away.”
But the sudden stop had sprung something, and Horatius was out fixing it. He had pulled off his cap and got under the machine, and I saw the beaded sweat begin to rise on the crown of his bald head, like bubbles on a mill pond.
This did me a world of good. I lighted a cigar, propped up and began to smoke.
For half an hour he tinkered and tinkered. I smoked and gave him such bits of sarcastic encouragement as happened into my head. I reminded him that Tempus was fugiting, and that it was already quite 9:50 and we were still ten miles from nowhere; that the little mare would have been there by now, and we would still have had some friends left on the Bear Creek pike.
“Consider the lilies that ride in automobiles,” I quoted—“they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that that old gray mare, in all her glory never worked as hard as you are working now.”
It was my time, and Jack and I enjoyed it, sensible dog that he was. After every bit of such he’d wink and fairly guffaw.
Horatio was working hard. He was groveling in the dirt to do it, too, and that suited me also. I could gauge his efforts by the sweat drops that arose on his bald spot, growing and then bursting like soap bubbles, to roll down his collar.
“Plague it,” he said at last, rising, “I can’t see very well without my glasses. Say, stop your guying, now, and look under here and see if you can see what’s wrong.”