er control. The trail was heavy from the night rain that
had swept the prairie like a new broom, but the sun was shining again
and the air was like champagne. The ozone and the exercise and Paddy's
_legato_ stride all tended to key up my spirits, and I went along
humming:

"Bake me a bannock,
And cut me a callop,
For I've stole me a grey mare
And I'm off at a gallop!"

It wasn't until I saw Paddy's ear prick up like a rabbit's that I
noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. At least I thought it was a
gun-boat, for a minute or two, until I cantered closer and saw that it
was a huge gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. Beside
it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes and a rather
disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on
his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I
circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose
poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a rooting shote.

"Good morning, Diana," he said, quite coolly, as he removed his
battered-looking cap.

His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I returned it in the
curtest of nods.

"Are you in trouble?" I asked.

"None whatever," he airily replied, still eying me. "But my car seems
to be, doesn't it?"

"What's wrong?" I demanded, determined that he shouldn't elbow me out
of my matter-of-factness.

He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.

"I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water
boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I'm
perfectly satisfied."

"With what?" I coldly inquired.

"With being stuck here," he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye
with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there
was something fundamentally wrong with him.

"What makes you feel that way?" I asked, though for a moment I'd been
prompted to inquire if they hadn't let him out a little too soon.

"Because I wouldn't have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent
moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn't mired herself in
this mud-hole," he had the effrontery to tell me.

"Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?" I asked,
deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn't confronting an
untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more