irritably.

"Then how'll this suit you?" he called. "We'll declare that first 'one
good turn' a failure and start afresh. Do _me_ a good turn."

Jimmie halted in his tracks and looked back suspiciously.

"I'm going to Hunter's Island Inn," called the young man, "and I've lost
my way. You get in here and guide me. That'll be doing me a good turn."

On either side of the road, blotting out the landscape, giant hands
picked out in electric-light bulbs pointed the way to Hunter's Island
Inn. Jimmie grinned and nodded toward them.

"Much obliged," he called. "I got ter walk." Turning his back upon
temptation, he waddled forward into the flickering heat waves.

* * * * *

The young man did not attempt to pursue. At the side of the road, under
the shade of a giant elm, he had brought the car to a halt and with his
arms crossed upon the wheel sat motionless, following with frowning eyes
the retreating figure of Jimmie. But the narrow-chested and knock-kneed
boy staggering over the sun-baked asphalt no longer concerned him. It
was not Jimmie, but the code preached by Jimmie, and not only preached
but before his eyes put into practise, that interested him. The young
man with white hair had been running away from temptation. At forty
miles an hour he had been running away from the temptation to do a
fellow mortal "a good turn." That morning, to the appeal of a drowning
Caesar to "Help me, Cassius, or I sink," he had answered: "Sink!" That
answer he had no wish to reconsider. That he might not reconsider he had
sought to escape. It was his experience that a sixty-horse-power
racing-machine is a jealous mistress. For retrospective, sentimental, or
philanthropic thoughts she grants no leave of absence. But he had not
escaped. Jimmie had halted him, tripped him by the heels, and set him
again to thinking. Within the half-hour that followed those who rolled
past saw at the side of the road a car with her engine running, and
leaning upon the wheel, as unconscious of his surroundings as though he
sat at his own fireplace, a young man who frowned and stared at nothing.
The half-hour passed and the young man swung his car back toward the
city. But at the first road-house that showed a blue-and-white telephone
sign he left it, and into the iron box at the end of the bar dropped a
nickel. He wished to communicate with Mr. Carroll, of Carroll and
Hastings; and when he learned Mr. Carroll had just issued or