up, facing him.
Her face was flushed from restrained mirth, but it might well have been
the flush of indignation.

"If we could don't you suppose we would?" she queried, rather
incoherently. "Do you think I'm doing this for fun?" Then she abruptly
disappeared from sight again. The abruptness was caused by the terrible
fear that if she stood looking at that sour old visage another moment
she would have to spoil everything by laughing.

As for the other girls, they were slowly turning purple in an effort to
maintain the solemnity demanded by the occasion. A strange noise from
beneath the car, promptly followed by a choked cough, didn't help them
any, and they were relieved when their victim turned his suspicious gaze
from them to the shallow ditch at the side of the road which was still
muddy from the rain of the night before. The only hope he had of getting
around them was to drive through this mud.

Without a word or a glance in their direction, he whipped up his team
and started for the ditch. This was something the girls had not
foreseen, and they were of no mind to let him get ahead of them again.

Grace and Amy flashed a distress signal to Betty, who stooped over
Mollie's feet, the feet being all that could be seen of her, and cried
with a peculiar inflection:

"I think you must have found the trouble by this time, Mollie, haven't
you?"

Mollie took the hint and scrambled hurriedly to her feet.

"I think so," she said, then as her eyes swiftly took in the
situation--the grim old man already struggling through the ditch intent
on getting ahead of them--she jumped to her seat and started the engine.
"All right," she cried gayly. "Come on, girls, jump in."

The girls jumped in with alacrity and Betty and Grace ran to the car in
front. Then while the man whipped up his horses and called to them in
terms far from gentle, the two cars sprang forward and were off down the
road.

They turned once, to find the man urging his team to the road and
shaking his fist after the "gasoline wagons." The girls waved to him
merrily, before the turn in the road shut him from sight.

"I guess that will teach him a lesson," said Grace, settling back
comfortably.

"Shouldn't wonder," agreed Betty absently, adding with a rueful little
smile. "It was great fun, of course, but I hope we shan't meet many more
of his kind, or we'll never get to Bluff Point."

"We're almost there now," said Grace. "All this part of the country is