strong a prejudice against the automobile as their English
brothers, especially when the offender is a foreigner, it might go hard
with everyone concerned. This would be a dismal interruption of our
tour, and if I hadn't felt sure that the enemy would be in as great a
funk of the police as we were, I wouldn't have ventured on so bold a
bluff. I trembled internally for an instant as to its success, but as
usual in life and poker, it paid.

"No, you don't!" shouted not the one peasant, but many in chorus, as
unlike the merry peasant-chorus of light opera as you can imagine. "We
won't have the police. We attend to this affair ourselves."

And it began to look as if they meant to. "Give the five hundred francs,
or you will be sorry!" they yelled, and again, in a second, they were
all surging round us, threatening with their fists, snatching out their
pocket-knives, and I saw things were getting hot. A French crowd barks a
good deal before it bites, but this one had come to the biting stage. We
were far from town and the police, even if the latter wouldn't have done
us more harm than good. Here we had Miss Randolph and Miss Kedison. If
Payne were as useless as I judged him, I was one man against forty.

The two ladies were still on the car. Payne had got off at first, but
had slipped back when things began to be lively. I alone was on the
ground, close to the bonnet, so that if needful I could protect the
motor and Miss Randolph at the same time.

The crowd consulted an instant, then stampeded the car. Aunt Mary
shrieked, and threw out her purse, as if she flung a live lamb to hungry
wolves. The motor was going still, but to charge into the crowd might
mean killing a dozen wretched peasants. It was out of the question, but
something must be done, and now was the moment for doing it. One fellow
tried to snatch a sable rug off Miss Kedison's knees; I struck his hand
away, and sent him staggering. Then I yelled to Payne to get into the
_tonneau_. There was no more pride left in him than in a rag, and he
crawled over, like a dog. Meanwhile, I'd made up my mind what to do, and
was going to try an experiment as our best chance to get out of the town
without bloodshed.

I knew that a union which held the exhaust pipe in place on the silencer
had been working loose. I grabbed a spanner out of the tool-box, and
elbowing my way along the side of the car again, with two turns of the
spanner loosened the union, pushed forward the t