JOHN HENRY AND THE BENZINE BUGGY.
A cross-country dub named Montrose has been doing the Shine specialty around Clara Jane lately.
He began to call evenings and bring a bunch of ready-grown flowers with him as big as a hay stack.
Then he'd spread around the parlor and tell her how he won the long-distance running jump in the '01 Yale class.
As you approached him from the front the first name you saw was Clarence—Clarence Edgerton Montrose.
Wouldn't that slap you!
I don't think Clara Jane considered him the real kittens, but he could talk fast and use long words and she found him pleasant company.
She said she loved to sit and shade her eyes with the $8 fan I gave her and listen to Clarence Edgerton Montrose while he discoursed about Palestine and the Holy Land.
If he was ever there he went in a hack.
That's the trouble with some of those college come-outs! The Professors beat them over the head with a geography and then as soon as they get a crowd around they begin to go to the places that struck them hardest.
As an honest, hard-working man it was my duty to put the boots to Edgerton and run him down the lane as far as the eye could see.
So I framed up Clarence's finish with much attention to detail.
I looked over Clara Jane's dates ahead and found that Clarence had rented the house for a Wednesday matinee, so I hired one of those horseless carriage things and pulled up in front of the windows just about the time I thought His Feathers would be playing the overture.
I knew that Clara Jane would cancel the contract with the mutt that mixed in just as soon as she saw the automobile snap.
I figured that the picture entitled "The True Lover's Departure in the Dream Wagon" would put a crimp in Clarence about the size of a barn door.
It was my third or fourth time behind the lever of the busy barouche, but I was wise that you pulled the plug this way when you wanted it to go ahead, and you shoved it back when you wanted it to stop.
When it came to benzine buggies I felt that my education was complete.
I was George Gazazza, the real Rolando, when I pulled up in front of my lady friend's front gate.
My market price was $18,000 a square inch.
In six minutes by the watch Clara Jane was down and in the kerosene caravan.
Clarence hadn't arrived.
Somebody must have put him next, but I knew where he lived and I figured it out that after we came back from Lonely Lane I'd send the landau around and around the block he camped in till I made him dizzy.
Clara Jane was the feature of the game.
She was the limit in ladies' dress goods.
For a chaser she wore one of those feather boas that feel cool because they look so warm.
"For a chaser she wore one of those feather boas."
Well, I turned the horseless gag into the shell road and cut loose.
We were doing about 43 miles an hour and the birdies were singing on the way.
Clarence Edgerton Montrose was working in Shaft No. 3, back in the mines—my lady friend told me so.
She was having the time of her life.
I was her candy boy for sure.
Just then something snapped and the machine started for Portland, Maine, on the basis of a mile in eight seconds.
Clara Jane grabbed me around the neck and I grabbed the lever.
"The eccentric has buckled the thingamajig!" I yelled, pushing the lever over to stop the carryall.
The thing gave me the horse laugh, jumped over a telegraph pole, bit its way through a barb-wire fence and then started down the road at the rate of 2,000,000 miles a minute.
"Why don't you stop it?" screamed my lady friend.
"I'll be the goat; what's the answer?" I said, clawing the lever and ducking the low bridges.
We met a man on a bicycle and the last I saw of him as we whizzed by he had found a soft spot in a field about four blocks away and he was going into it head first.
We kept his bicycle and carried it along on our smoke stack.
I couldn't stop the thing to save my life.
Every time I yanked the lever the snap would let a chortle out of its puzzle department and fly 400 feet straight through the air.
We were headed for an old ash heap, and my market price had gone down to three cents a ton.
"Don't jump!" I yelled to my lady friend, but the wind whisked the first half of my sentence away.
Clara Jane gathered her skirts in a bunch and did a flying leap out of the crazy cab.
She landed right in the middle of that heap of fresh ashes—and she made good.
All I could see was a great, gray cloud as I pushed on to the next stand. About half a mile further down the road the machine concluded to turn into a farm-yard and give the home folks a treat.
It went through a window in the barn, out through a skylight, did the hula dance over the lawn, and then fell in the well and stayed there, panting as though its little gas-engine heart would break.
When I limped back to Clara Jane the storm signals were flying.
She was away out on the ice.
The feather boa looked like the hawser on a canal boat, and the ashes had changed the pattern of her dress goods.
We were stingy talkers on the road home.
It will take me two years to square myself.
Hereafter, me to the trolley!
Me to the saucy stage coach when I'm due to gallop away and away!
No more benzine buggies for yours sincerely!
Never again for the bughouse barouche! Not me.
I have only one consolation: The chap we pried off the bicycle was Clarence Edgerton Montrose.
It will take him about three years and two months to find all the spots that foolish-wagon knocked off him.
Meantime, I hope to be Clara Jane's sugar buyer again.