roads we all know so well. As I finished the race almost before I
began it, the less said about the affair the better--but I shall never
forget that Paris to Vienna meeting, and I shall never forget it
because of my friend Ferdinand,[1] one of the best and bravest who ever
turned a wheel, and the right winner of that great prize, but for the
woman who said "No," and said it so queerly and to such effect that a
magician out of the story-books couldn't have done it better.

I liked Ferdinand, liked him from the start. A better figure of a man
I shall never see; six feet to an inch, square set and wonderfully
muscular. His hair was dark and ridiculously curly, so much so that
talk of the "irons and brown paper" was the standing joke amongst the
racing men in Paris, who knew no more of him than that he was an
Italian by birth and had spent half his life in America. For the rest,
he spoke English as well as I did, and I never knew whether Ferdinand
was his real name, or one he took for the racecourse--nor did I care.

They say that there is no cloud without a silver lining--a poor
consolation in a thunderstorm when your hood is at home and the nearest
tree is three miles away. There had been a thunderstorm, I remember,
on the morning I met poor Ferdinand, and my batteries had refused to
hand out another volt, notwithstanding the plainest kind of speech in
which I could address them. Just in the middle of it, when the rain
was running in at the neck and out at the ankles, and I was asking
myself why I wasn't a footman in yellow plush breeches, what should
happen but that a great red car came loping up on the horizon, like
some mad thing answering to the lightning's call--and no sooner was it
a mile distant than it was by me, so to speak, and I was listening to
my friend Ferdinand for the first time.

"Halloa, and what's taken your fancy in these parts?" he asked in a
cheery voice. I told him as plainly.

"This musical box don't like the thunder," said I; "she's turned sour."

"Are you stopping here for the lady, or do you want to get back to
Paris?"

"Oh," says I, "I haven't taken a lease of this particular furlong, if
that's what you mean."

"Then I'll give you a tow," says he, and without another word, he got
down from his seat and began to make a job of it. We were at Vendreux
half an hour afterwards, and there we breakfasted together in the
French fashion. That meal, I always say, was the luckiest friend