ce with dictionaries, but having a facile
imagination and some creative ability, Casey kept pace with progress and
invented words of his own which he applied lavishly to all automobiles;
but particularly and emphatically he applied the spiciest, most colorful
ones to Fords.

Put yourself in Casey's place, and you will understand. Imagine yourself
with a thirty-mile trip to make down a twisty, rough mountain road built
in the days when men hauled ore down the mountain on wagons built to bump
over rocks without damage to anything but human bones. You are Casey Ryan,
remember; you never stopped for stage robbers or grizzlies in the past,
and you have your record to maintain as the hardest driver in the West.
You are proud of that record, because you know how you have driven to earn
it.

You pop the lash over the ears of your leaders and go whooping down a
long, straight bit of road where you count on making time. When you are
about halfway down and the four horses are running even and tugging
pleasantly at the reins, and you are happy enough to sing your favorite
song, which begins,

"Hey, ole Bill! Can-n yuh play the fiddle-o?
Yes, by gosh! I--I--kin play a liddle-o--"

and never gets beyond that one flat statement, around the turn below you
comes a Ford, rattling all its joints trying to make the hill on "high."
The driver honks wildly at you to give him the road--you, Casey Ryan!
Wouldn't you writhe and invent words and apply them viciously to all Fords
and the man who invented them? But the driver comes at you honking,
squawking,--and you turn out.

You have to, unless the Ford does; and Fords don't. A Ford will send a
twin-six swerving sharply to the edge of a ditch, and even Casey Ryan must
swing his leaders to the right in obedience to that raucous command.

Once Casey didn't. He had the patience of the good-natured, and for awhile
he had contented himself with his vocabulary and his reputation as a
driver and a fighter, and the record he held of making the thirty miles
from Pinnacle to Lund in an hour and thirty-five minutes, twenty-six days
in the month. (He did not publish his running expenses, by the way, nor
did he mention the fact that his passengers were mostly strangers picked
up at the railway station at Lund because they liked the look of the
picturesque four-horses-and-Casey stagecoach.)

Once Casey refused to turn out. That morning he had been compelled to wait
and whip a heavy man who berate