ll for and
deliver them. He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle
handlebars. On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat
paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching
frame.

At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage. He hadn't been there a
month before the owner was saying, "Say, Chug, take a look at this here
bus, will you? She don't run right but I can't find out what's got into
her."

Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and
count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope. The
look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string.

For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested
batteries, oiled tappets. But the thing that fascinated him was the
engine. An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just
emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it. When a new car came
in, en route--a proud, glittering affair--he always managed to get a
chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so
jealously. The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an
electric brougham. Chippewa's well-paved streets made these vehicles
possible. Your true garage man's feeling for electrics is unprintable.
The least that they called them was juice-boxes.

At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his
mother. The Scaritt's window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always
rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck. By the
time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was
saying, "You're around that garage sixteen hours a day. When you're home
you're everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things. Your
pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on
Sundays."

"Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place.
Soon's I do I'm going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn,
and I'm going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over
my knee, and pile 'em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of 'em."

"They've been pretty good friends to us, Chug--those curtain frames."

"Um." He glanced at her parboiled fingers. "Just the same, it'll be nix
with the lace curtains for you."

Glancing back on what has been told of Chug he sounds, somehow, so much
like a modern Rollo, with a dash of Alger, that unless something is told
of his social