even windshield and running-board. It was a toy--a
card-board box on toothpick axles. Strapped to the bulging back was a
wicker suitcase partly covered by tarpaulin. From the seat peered a
little furry face.

"A cat?" she exclaimed, as he came up with a wire rope, extracted from
the tin back.

"Yes. She's the captain of the boat. I'm just the engineer."

"What is her name?"

Before he answered the young man strode ahead to the front of her car,
Claire obediently trotting after him. He stooped to look at her front
axle. He raised his head, glanced at her, and he was blushing again.

"Her name is Vere de Vere!" he confessed. Then he fled back to his bug.
He drove it in front of the Gomez-Dep. The hole in the road itself was
as deep as the one on the edge of the cornfield, where she was stuck,
but he charged it. She was fascinated by his skill. Where she would for
a tenth of a second have hesitated while choosing the best course, he
hurled the bug straight at the hole, plunged through with sheets of
glassy black water arching on either side, then viciously twisted the
car to the right, to the left, and straight again, as he followed the
tracks with the solidest bottoms.

Strapped above the tiny angle-iron step which replaced his running-board
was an old spade. He dug channels in front of the four wheels of her
car, so that they might go up inclines, instead of pushing against the
straight walls of mud they had thrown up. On these inclines he strewed
the brush she had brought, halting to ask, with head alertly lifted from
his stooped huddle in the mud, "Did you have to get this brush
yourself?"

"Yes. Horrid wet!"

He merely shook his head in commiseration.

He fastened the tow-rope to the rear axle of his car, to the front of
hers. "Now will you be ready to put on all your power as I begin to
pull?" he said casually, rather respectfully.

When the struggling bug had pulled the wire rope taut, she opened the
throttle. The rope trembled. Her car seemed to draw sullenly back. Then
it came out--out--really out, which is the most joyous sensation any
motorist shall ever know. In excitement over actually moving again, as
fast as any healthy young snail, she drove on, on, the young man ahead
grinning back at her. Nor did she stop, nor he, till both cars were
safe on merely thick mud, a quarter of a mile away.

She switched off the power--and suddenly she was in a whirlwind of dizzy
sickening tiredness. Even in her a