Just then something snapped and the machine started for Portland,
Maine, on the basis of a mile in eight seconds.
Clara Jane grabbed me around the neck and I grabbed the lever.
"The eccentric has buckled the thingamajig!" I yelled, pushing the
lever over to stop the carryall.
The thing gave me the horse laugh, jumped over a telegraph pole, bit
its way through a barb-wire fence and then started down the road at
the rate of 2,000,000 miles a minute.
"Why don't you stop it?" screamed my lady friend.
"I'll be the goat; what's the answer?" I said, clawing the lever and
ducking the low bridges.
We met a man on a bicycle and the last I saw of him as we whizzed by
he had found a soft spot in a field about four blocks away and he was
going into it head first.
We kept his bicycle and carried it along on our smoke stack.