“Then what in the world are you going to do with it?”
“Run it.”
“But, my dear Miss Messiter, it isn’t an automobile or any other kind of toy. You must remember that it takes a business head and a great deal of experience to make such an investment pay. I really think—”
“My school ends on the fourteenth of June. I’ll get a substitute for the last two months. I shall start for Wyoming on the eighteenth of April.”
The man of law gasped, explained the difficulties again carefully as to a child, found that he was wasting his breath, and wisely gave it up.
Miss Messiter had started on the eighteenth of April, as she had announced. When she reached Gimlet Butte, the nearest railroad point to the Lazy D, she found a group of curious, weatherbeaten individuals gathered round a machine foreign to their experience. It was on a flat car, and the general opinion ran the gamut from a newfangled sewing machine to a thresher. Into this guessing contest came its owner with so brisk and businesslike an energy that inside of two hours she was testing it up and down the wide street of Gimlet Butte, to the wonder and delight of an audience to which each one of the eleven saloons of the city had contributed its admiring quota.
Meanwhile the young woman attended strictly to business. She had disappeared for half an hour with a suit case into the Elk House; and when she returned in a short-skirted corduroy suit, leggings and wide-brimmed gray Stetson hat, all Gimlet Butte took an absorbing interest in the details of this delightful adventure that had happened to the town. The population was out en masse to watch her slip down the road on a trial trip.
Presently “Soapy” Sothern, drifting in on his buckskin from the Hoodoo Peak country, where for private reasons of his own he had been for the past month a sojourner, reported that he had seen the prettiest sight in the State climbing under a gasoline bronc with a monkey-wrench in her hand. Where? Right over the hill on the edge of town. The immediate stampede for the cow ponies was averted by a warning chug-chug that sounded down the road, followed by the appearance of a flashing whir that made the ponies dance on their hind legs.
“The gasoline bronc lady sure makes a hit with me,” announced “Texas,” gravely. “I allow I’ll rustle a job with the Lazy D outfit.”
“She ce’tainly rides herd on that machine like a champeen,” admitted Soapy. “I reckon I’ll drift over to the Lazy D with you to look after yore remains, Tex, when the lightning hits you.”