s and Wemple struggled
with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan,
groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon
him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy
sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a mile of Mrs.
Morgan.

Miss Drexel laughed and joked and encouraged; and Wemple, in brutal
fashion, compelled Mrs. Morgan to walk every third quarter of a mile.
At the end of an hour the sorrel refused positively to get up, and, so,
was abandoned. Thereafter, Mrs. Morgan rode the roan alternate quarters
of miles, and between times walked--if _walk_ may describe her
stumbling progress on two preposterously tiny feet with a man supporting
her on either side.

A mile from the river, the road became more civilized, running along the
side of a thousand acres of banana plantation.

"Parslow's," young Drexel said. "He'll lose a year's crop now on account
of this mix-up."

"Oh, look what I've found!" Miss Drexel called from the lead.

"First machine that ever tackled this road," was young Drexel's
judgment, as they halted to stare at the tire-tracks.

"But look at the tracks," his sister urged. "The machine must have come
right out of the bananas and climbed the bank."

"Some machine to climb a bank like that," was Davies' comment. "What it
did do was to go down the bank--take a scout after it, Charley, while
Wemple and I get Mrs. Morgan off her fractious mount. No machine ever
built could travel far through those bananas."

The flea-bitten roan, on its four legs upstanding, continued bravely to
stand until the lady was removed, whereupon, with a long sigh, it sank
down on the ground. Mrs. Morgan likewise sighed, sat down, and regarded
her tiny feet mournfully.

"Go on, boys," she said. "Maybe you can find something at the river and
send back for me."

But their indignant rejection of the plan never attained speech, for, at
that instant, from the green sea of banana trees beneath them, came the
sudden purr of an engine. A minute later the splutter of an exhaust told
them the silencer had been taken off. The huge-fronded banana trees were
violently agitated as by the threshing of a hidden Titan. They could
identify the changing of gears and the reversing and going ahead, until,
at the end of five minutes, a long low, black car burst from the wall of
greenery and charged the soft earth bank, but the earth was too soft,
and when, two-