"Gasolene from the hotel keeper" 



friend turning the crest of the hill. 

 Tired ? Not he ! His machine has been 

 "going faster all the way up," he glee- 

 fully informs us. A few miles further 

 on we begin to feel that the inner man 

 is being neglected, and so at the first 

 roadhouse we stop for dinner, and, 

 profiting by past experiences, secure 

 enough gasoline from the hotel-keeper 

 to fill our partly exhausted tanks. 



Somehow the ride home always 

 seems shorter than the trip out. It 

 seems but a few moments till the cross- 

 roads are reached, and the old tree 

 which marks the "half-way." We pres- 

 ently begin to congratulate ourselves 

 that for once we will make a trip with- 

 out marring incident. But not so. Sud- 

 denly our wheel hits a stone and the 

 jar of the impact is followed by a ter- 

 rible crash and rumble from the engine. 

 We shut off the power, dismount has- 

 tily, and find that one of the links in the 

 chain has given away. A new link is 

 quickly inserted, and we are presently 

 as good as ever. 



As we ride slowly along in the even- 

 ing sunlight, we can hear far behind us 



the muffled whirr of some big four- 

 cylinder, which is tearing along the 

 road at a race-horse clip. In a moment 

 the honk-honk of the horn warns us 

 that we must get out of the way. But 

 shall we admit for a moment that any 

 four-wheeled machine shall crowd us 

 out of the road? By the shades of the 

 full gasoline tank — a thousand times 

 no ! So we set back the spark and open 

 the throttle ready for a spurt, and as 

 the coughing monster approaches us 

 we begin to let her out. We can hear 

 the driver turn on more power, but he 

 must turn on a lot if he is going to pass 

 us by. We will let him work up all the 

 speed his big heavy-loaded machine is 

 capable of, in reckless defiance of law 

 or ordinance, but at a proper moment 

 our spark goes way over, the light ma- 

 chine fairly jumps from the ground as 

 we leap ahead. Hitting only the high 

 places, we cover a couple of miles, gain- 

 ing all the time, but soon we cross the 

 city line, where blue-coated minions of 

 the law and a sense of consideration for 

 the public safety combine to check us 

 down, and we slowly roll home without 



128 



