implacably hesitant, ponderous but determined, the
huge bus backed along the track it had so cruelly worn in the sward--out
through the gap in the fair fence, over the side-walk and into the road,
rocking perilously, but settling level at last. Thereupon the young hero
had done something else with mysterious handles, and the bus glided
swiftly on to the depot, making the twelve-two in ample time.

Great moments are vouchsafed only to those souls fortified to survive
them. To one who had tamed the proud spirit of Sharon Whipple's hellion
it was but lightsome child's play to guide this honest and amiable new
bus. To the Mansion he returned in triumph with a load of passengers,
driving with zest, and there receiving from villagers inflamed by tales
of his prowess an ovation that embarrassed him with its heartiness. He
hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its
station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling
Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled
empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty
stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never
touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian
hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution.
Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age. Unable to adapt
himself, he would see the Mansion's stable become a noisome garage,
while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to a few
remaining horses.

Wilbur Cowan guided the Mansion's bus for two days. He longed for it as
a life work, but school was on and he was not permitted to abandon this,
even for a glorious life at the wheel. There came a youth in neat
uniform to perform this service--described by Starling Tucker as a young
squirt that wouldn't know one end of a hawse from the other. Only on
Saturdays--on Saturdays openly and clandestinely on Sundays--was there
present on the driver's seat a knowing amateur who could have sat there
every day but for having unreasonably to learn about compound fractions
and geography.

CHAPTER X

Now school was over for another summer and Trimble Cushman's dray could
be driven at a good wage--by a boy overnight become a man. There were
still carpers who would regard him as a menace to life and limb. Judge
Penniman was among these. A large truck in sole charge of a boy--still
in his teens, as the judge pu