ese were quite enough to hold Bud oblivious to
the conversation of strangers.

At dawn they neared a little village. Through this particular county the
road was unpaved and muddy, and the car was a sight to behold. The only
clean spot was on the windshield, where Bud had reached around once or
twice with a handful of waste and cleaned a place to see through. It was
raining soddenly, steadily, as though it always had rained and always
would rain.

Bud turned his face slightly to one side. "How about stopping; I'll have
to feed her some oil--and it wouldn't hurt to fill the gas tank again.
These heavy roads eat up a lot of extra power. What's her average
mileage on a gallon, Foster?"

"How the deuce should I know?" Foster snapped, just coming out of a
doze.

"You ought to know, with your own car--and gas costing what it does."

"Oh!--ah--what was it you asked?" Foster yawned aloud. "I musta been
asleep."

"I guess you musta been, all right," Bud grunted. "Do you want breakfast
here, or don't you? I've got to stop for gas and oil; that's what I was
asking?"

The two consulted together, and finally told Bud to stop at the first
garage and get his oil and gas. After that he could drive to a drug
store and buy a couple of thermos bottles, and after that he could go to
the nearest restaurant and get the bottles filled with black coffee, and
have lunch put up for six people. Foster and his friend would remain in
the car.

Bud did these things, revising the plan to the extent of eating his own
breakfast at the counter in the restaurant while the lunch was being
prepared in the kitchen.

From where he sat he could look across at the muddy car standing before
a closed millinery-and-drygoods store. It surely did not look much like
the immaculate machine he had gloated over the evening before, but it
was a powerful, big brute of a car and looked its class in every line.
Bud was proud to drive a car like that. The curtains were buttoned down
tight, and he thought amusedly of the two men huddled inside, shivering
and hungry, yet refusing to come in and get warmed up with a decent
breakfast. Foster, he thought, must certainly be scared of his wife, if
he daren't show himself in this little rube town. For the first time Bud
had a vagrant suspicion that Foster had not told quite all there was to
tell about this trip. Bud wondered now if Foster was not going to meet
a "Jane" somewhere in the South. That terrifying Mann Act wou