the pub stables in the main
street. Harry crossed the streets diagonally to the opposite corner,
in a line with the van. There he slipped the bar down over the horse's
rump, and fastened one end of the wire on to the ring of it. Then he
walked back to the van, carrying the wire and letting the coils go
wide, and, as noiselessly as possible, made a loop in the loose end and
slipped it over the hooks on the end of the pole. ("Unnecessary detail!"
my contemporaries will moan, "Overloaded with uninteresting details!"
But that's because they haven't got the details--and it's the details
that go.) Then Harry skipped back to his horse, jumped on, gathered up
the bridle reins, and used his spurs. There was a swish and a clang, a
scrunch and a clock-clock and rattle of wheels, and a surprised human
sound; then a bump and a shout--for there was no underground drainage,
and the gutters belonged to the Stone Age. There was a swift clocking
and rattle, more shouts, another bump, and a yell. And so on down the
longish main street. The stable-boy, who had left the horses in his
excitement, burst into the bar, shouting, "The Hypnertism's on, the
Mesmerism's on! Ole Mae's van's runnin' away with him without no horses
all right!" The crowd scuffled out into the street; there were some
unfortunate horses hanging up of course at the panel by the pub trough,
and the first to get to them jumped on and rode; the rest ran. The
hall--where they were clearing the willing professor out in favour of a
"darnce"--and the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls
skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other
souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather,
something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long
back humped--for effect)--apparently fleeing for its life in a veil
of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an
unaccountable tilted coach careered in its own separate cloud of dust.
And from it came the shouts and yells. Men shouted and swore, women
screamed for their children, and kids whimpered. Some of the men turned
with an oath and stayed the panic with:

"It's only one of them flamin' motor-cars, you fools."

It might have been, and the yells the warning howls of a motorist who
had burst or lost his honk-kook and his head.

"It's runnin' away!" or "The toff's mad or drunk!" shouted others.
"It'll break its crimson back over the bridge."