le. I
should vish I could ride once in an automobile! But--I am so 'shamed, so
'shamed that I must sit and see my _Mann_ make this. Forty years I been
married to him, and pretty soon I die----"

Claire patted her hand. There was nothing to say to tragedy that had
outlived hope.

Adolph Zolzac clumped out to the highroad behind his vast,
rolling-flanked horses--so much cleaner and better fed than his wisp of
a wife. Claire followed him, and in her heart she committed murder and
was glad of it. While Mr. Boltwood looked out with mild wonder at
Claire's new friend, Zolzac hitched his team to the axle. It did not
seem possible that two horses could pull out the car where seventy
horsepower had fainted. But, easily, yawning and thinking about dinner,
the horses drew the wheels up on the mud-bank, out of the hole and----

The harness broke, with a flying mess of straps and rope, and the car
plumped with perfect exactness back into its bed.

CHAPTER III

A YOUNG MAN IN A RAINCOAT

"Huh! Such an auto! Look, it break my harness a'ready! Two dollar that
cost you to mend it. De auto iss too heavy!" stormed Zolzac.

"All right! All right! Only for heaven's sake--go get another harness!"
Claire shrieked.

"Fife-fifty dot will be, in all." Zolzac grinned.

Claire was standing in front of him. She was thinking of other drivers,
poor people, in old cars, who had been at the mercy of this
golden-hearted one. She stared past him, in the direction from which she
had come. Another motor was in sight.

It was a tin beetle of a car; that agile, cheerful, rut-jumping model
known as a "bug"; with a home-tacked, home-painted tin cowl and tail
covering the stripped chassis of a little cheap Teal car. The lone
driver wore an old black raincoat with an atrocious corduroy collar, and
a new plaid cap in the Harry Lauder tartan. The bug skipped through mud
where the Boltwoods' Gomez had slogged and rolled. Its pilot drove up
behind her car, and leaped out. He trotted forward to Claire and Zolzac.
His eyes were twenty-seven or eight, but his pink cheeks were twenty,
and when he smiled--shyly, radiantly--he was no age at all, but eternal
boy. Claire had a blurred impression that she had seen him before, some
place along the road.

"Stuck?" he inquired, not very intelligently. "How much is Adolph
charging you?"

"He wants three-fifty, and his harness broke, and he wants two
dollars----"

"Oh! So he's still working that old gag!