"After all you've writ, I don't think you had oughter done this," she
said, and then they all drove sedately off, still looking toward the
horizon.
"Now that's the worst thing about automobiles," said Horace, 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're not likely to meet any more of them."
"I hope not," I sighed, pulling out a cigar and a 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 barn
dance:
First an old sorrel mare, a worn-out buggy of the vintage of 1874, and
two old ladies.
The whole thing approached gingerly, creeping up like a yellow cat. It
was a toss-up as to which of the two's eyes popped the biggest, or which
had her mouth shut tightest. The old mare was game, and sidled up, and
just as I saw the wheels begin to form in her head the occupants threw
down the lines and began to pop two pairs of country-yarned legs out of
the two sides of the buggy, exclaiming, "Fur ther Lord's sake thar,
Mister, ketch 'er!"