Part 21

"What's wrong?" I demanded, determined that he shouldn't elbow me out of my matter-of-factness.

He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.

"I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I'm perfectly satisfied."

"With what?" I coldly inquired.

"With being stuck here," he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there was something fundamentally wrong with him.

"What makes you feel that way?" I asked, though for a moment I'd been prompted to inquire if they hadn't let him out a little too soon.

"Because I wouldn't have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn't mired herself in this mud-hole," he had the effrontery to tell me.

"Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?" I asked, deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn't confronting an untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more pointedly and more impersonally than ever.

"It's more than consolatory," he said with an accentuating flourish of the little briar pipe. "It's quite compensatory."

It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.

"Do you want to get out of that hole?" I demanded. For it's a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in distress.

"Not if it means an ending to this interview," he told me.

It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn't much warmth in the inspection.

"What are you trying to do?" I calmly inquired, for prairie life hadn't exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of that stalker known as Man.

"I'm trying to figure out," he just as calmly retorted, apparently quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, "how anything as radiant and lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and coyotes."

The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.

"And I'm still trying to figure out," I told him, "how what impresses me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what looks like a first-class car! Unless," and the thought came to me out of a clear sky, and when they come that way they're inspirations and are usually true, "unless you stole it!"

He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it from end to end.

"If I'm that far behind Hyacinthe," he indifferently acknowledged, "I begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn't been altogether wasted."

"But you did steal the car?" I persisted.

"That must be a secret between us," he said, with a distinctly guilty look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs and bloodhounds on his track.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded, determined to thrash the thing out, now that it had been thrust upon me.

"Talking to the most charming woman I've encountered west of the Great Lakes," he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile. But I didn't intend him to draw a herring across the trail.

"I'd be obliged if you'd be sincere," I told him, sitting up a little straighter on Paddy.

"I am sincere," he protested, putting away his pipe.

"But the things you're saying are the things the right sort of person refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of their operation."

"Yes, that's quite true, in drawing-rooms," he airily amended. "But this is God's open and untrammeled prairie."

"Where crudeness is king," I added.