“Eet vus all right now.”
I took up the cat by the tail.
“Vut fur, you don’t vant heem,” he gasped.
“Yes, I do,” I said, hotly. “He’s mine. I’ve paid for him and I want to take him over yonder and rub him under the nose of that villain that induced me to go hunting in an automobile and steered me on the premises of a confounded Dago who keeps registered cats that look exactly like coons when up a tree.”
He thought I was complimenting him.
“Voila—I t’ank you,” he said, bowing again, with his hand on his stomach.
I hunted around an hour before I went to the machine. I waited to cool off. Jack found a fine covey, and I missed them right and left. I had lost my nerve and my luck.
When I reached the machine, Horatius was in, blinking, and we said not a word. It was my time to freeze. Smith had run out from town and fixed it. A little wire the size of a pencil point had got an inch out of place, and it had been as dead as a log wagon on us.
It was now exactly 3:30, but we decided we still had a chance to get a covey. We made the next three miles in beautiful time, meeting only one man driving a game, high-headed horse that swept by us without giving us the least notice.
“If they were all bred like that one,” I said, “a man in a machine might think he had some rights on the road.”