his hoarse, "Chug-chug! Da-r-r-n-ng!
Da-r-r-n-ng!" as he bore down upon a passerby caused that one to
sidestep precipitously into the gutter (and none too soon).

Chug earned his first real bicycle carrying a paper route for the
Chippewa _Eagle_. It took him two years. By the time he had acquired it
he knew so much about bicycles, from ball-bearings to handle-bars, that
its possession roused very little thrill in him. It was as when a lover
has had to wait over-long for his bride. As Chug whizzed about
Chippewa's streets, ringing an unnecessarily insistent bell, you sensed
that a motorcycle was already looming large in his mechanism-loving
mind. By the time he was seventeen Chug's motorcycle was spitting its
way venomously down Elm Street. And the sequence of the seasons was not
more inevitable than that an automobile should follow the motorcycle.
True, he practically built it himself, out of what appeared to be an old
wash-boiler, some wire, and an engine made up of parts that embraced
every known car from Ford to Fiat. He painted it an undeniable red,
hooded it like a demon racer, and shifted to first. The thing went.

He was a natural mechanic. He couldn't spend a day with a piece of
mechanism without having speeded it up, or in some way done something to
its belt, gears, wheels, motor. He was almost never separated from a
monkey-wrench or pliers, and he was always turning a nut or bolt or
screw in his grease-grimed fingers.

Right here it should be understood that Chug never became a Steinmetz or
a Wright. He remained just average-plus to the end, with something more
than a knack at things mechanical; a good deal of grease beneath his
nails; and, generally, a smudge under one eye or a swipe of black across
a cheek that gave him a misleadingly sinister and piratical look.
There's nothing very magnificent, surely, in being the proprietor of a
garage, even if it is the best-paying garage in Chippewa, where six out
of ten families own a car, and summer tourists are as locusts turned
beneficent.

Some time between Chug's motorcycle and the home-made automobile Len
Scaritt died. The loss to the household was social more than economic.
Len had been one of those good-natured, voluble, walrus-moustached men
who make such poor providers. A carpenter by trade, he had always been a
spasmodic worker and a steady talker. His high, hollow voice went on
endlessly above the fusillade of hammers at work and the clatter of
dishes