Page:Top-Notch Magazine, May 1 1915 (IA tn 1915 05 01).pdf/111

 "Hey!" shouted an excited voice. "She's goin'! Jump, jedge!"

Nathan Wiggin did not jump. He was not greatly alarmed at first. The thing had barely started; it was not running away. He had broken and trained vicious horses that other men could do nothing with, some of them veritable man-killers, and surely he could stop an inanimate contrivance like a motor car, especially when it was not under power. Possibly he was restrained also by a conviction that he could not abandon the car with dignity, and by the knowledge that to abandon it at all under such circumstances would possibly make him an object of ridicule. He knew with what keen gusto the Greenbushers "harped on a joke" and nagged the victim thereof.

"Whoa!" said the judge, moving quickly over into the driver's seat and grasping the wheel. "Whoa back!"

The car moved on, those persons who had been in front of it hastily scrambling out of the way. The judge braced hard with one foot against the clutch pedal, but that did not seem to have any effect. He grabbed one of the levers, thinking it might be the brake, and gave it a yank. It was the lever that manipulated the gears. At the same time his foot slipped off the clutch pedal.

Thrown into gear, the moving car cranked itself, and the engine leaped to life with a sudden vibrating hum. For in shifting the tiny lever on the dash Judge Wiggin had made connections with the magneto. The surprised man gasped as the machine gave a sudden forward lunge, like a horse beneath the stinging cut of a whip. Almost before he could gasp twice, the confounded thing was running away.

"Whoa!" shouted the dismayed man commandingly, surging back on the wheel with all his strength. "If the bit holds, I'll break your jaw, you"

One foot was planted on the accelerator, jamming it down and opening the throttle wide. The engine roared beneath the quivering hood. The car made a jump that seemed to take all four wheels off the ground. Judge Wiggin's hat flew off, his sparse gray hair stood on end, his eyes bularger|ed; but between his parted, drawn-back lips his teeth were set. Behind him he heard the horrified shouts of the crowd, through which Hitchens had vainly tried to plow a path in time to board the machine before it could get beyond his reach. Realizing he had failed, Hitchens stopped and flung up his arms in despair.

"The old fool!" he groaned. "He'll smash the car! He'll be killed!"

NNOYED and amazed by the inexplicable and cantankerous behavior of the automobile, Nathan Wiggin was, at the same time, aroused to resentment and wrath. The confounded thing was acting exactly like a wild, viciously ugly, unbroken colt. Immediately the judge's fighting blood rose. He was stirred by the tingling joy of contest; it throbbed in every vein of his body. Still holding the throttle wide open with one foot, he planted the other on the brake, and sawed at the wheel.

The things the automobile did then made it seem more than ever like a strong and furious young horse battling against restraint and mastery. It bucked and plunged in jerky jumps; it "pitched fence-cornered" from side to side, after the style of a Western broncho; it snorted and choked and snorted again.

"Whoa, you dratted catamaran!" snarled the judge. "You've gotter whoa or I'll take your jaw off!"

Only for the down grade he might have stalled the engine before the rack-