a lucky bit of spruce wood, the
whiffletree, and the axle, and got the pole spliced. It struck me that
even so we should have to do the rest of the way to Billy Jones's at a
walk, but I saw no sense in saying so. I got the horses back on the
pole, and Paulette in the wagon holding the reins, still talking to the
horses quietly and by name. But as I jumped up beside her the quiet flew
out of her voice.

"The _bottle_," she all but shrieked at me. "_Mind the bottle!_"

But I had not noticed she had put it on my seat when she got out to
hold the horses. I knocked it flying across her, and it smashed to
flinders on the near fore wheel, drenching it and splashing over Danny's
hind legs. I grabbed the reins from Paulette, and I thought of skunks,
and a sulphide factory,--and dead skunks and rotten sulphide at that.
Even in the freezing evening air the smell that came from that smashed
bottle was beyond anything on earth or purgatory, excepting the stuff I
had spilt over myself at Skunk's Misery. "What on earth," I began
stupidly. "Why, that's that Skunk's Misery filth again!"

Paulette's hand came down on my arm with a grip that could not have been
wilder if she had thought the awful smell meant our deaths. "Drive on,
will you?" she said in a voice that matched it. "Let the horses _go_, I
tell you! If there's anything left in that bottle it may save us for
a--I mean," she caught herself up furiously, "it may save me from being
sick. I don't know how you feel. But for heaven's sake get me out of
that smell! Oh, why didn't I throw the thing away into the woods, long
ago?"

I wished she had. The stuff was on Danny as well as on the wheel, and we
smelt like a procession of dead whales. For after the first choking
explosion of the thing it reeked of nothing but corruption. It was the
Skunk's Misery brew all right, only a thousand times stronger.

"How on earth did Skunk's Misery filth get in my wagon?" I gasped. And
if I had been alone I would have spat.

"I--can't tell you," said Paulette shortly. "Mr. Stretton, can't you
hurry the horses? I----Oh, hurry them, please!"

I saw no particular reason why; we could not get away from the smell of
the wheel, or of Danny. But I did wind them up as much as I dared with
our kind of a pole,--and suddenly both of them wound themselves up, with
a jerk to try any pole. I had all I could do to keep them from a dead
run, and if I knew the reason I trusted the girl beside me did not. It