Once Casey didn’t.  He had the patience of the good-natured, and for awhile he had contented himself with his vocabulary and his reputation as a driver and a fighter, and the record he held of making the thirty miles from Pinnacle to Lund in an hour and thirty-five minutes, twenty-six days in the month. (He did not publish his running expenses, by the way, nor did he mention the fact that his passengers were mostly strangers picked up at the railway station at Lund because they liked the look of the picturesque four-horses-and-Casey stagecoach.)

Once Casey refused to turn out.  That morning he had been compelled to wait and whip a heavy man who berated Casey because the heavy man’s wife had ridden from Pinnacle to Lund the day before and had fainted at the last sharp turn in the road and had not revived in time to board the train for Salt Lake which she had been anxious to catch.  Casey had known she was anxious to catch the train, and he had made the trip in an hour and twenty-nine minutes in spite of the fact that he had driven the last mile with a completely unconscious lady leaning heavily against his left shoulder.  She made much better time with Casey than she would have made on the narrow-gauge train which carried ore and passengers and mail to Lund, arriving when most convenient to the train crew.  That it took half an hour to restore her to consciousness was not Casey’s fault.

Casey had succeeded in whipping the heavy man till he hollered, but the effort had been noticeable.  Casey wondered uneasily whether by any chance he, Casey Ryan, was growing old with the rest of the world.  That possibility had never before occurred to him, and the thought was disquieting.  Casey Ryan too old to lick any man who gave him cause, too old to hold the fickle esteem of those who met him in the road?  Casey squinted belligerently at the Old-man-with-the-scythe and snorted.  “I licked him good.  You ask anybody.  And he’s twice as big as I am.  I guess they’s a good many years left in Casey Ryan yet!  Giddap, you—­thus-and-so!  We’re ten minutes late and we got our record!”

At that moment a Ford touring car popped around the turn below him and squawked presumptuously for a clear passage ahead.  Casey pulled his lash off the nigh leader, yelled and charged straight down the road.  Did they think they could honk him off the road?  Hunh!  Casey Ryan was still Casey Ryan.  Never again would he turn out for man or devil.

Wherefore Casey was presently extricating his leaders from the harness of his wheelers ten feet below the grade.  On the road above him the driver of the Ford inspected bent parts and a smashed headlight and cranked and cranked ineffectively, and swore down at Casey Ryan, who squinted unblinkingly up under his hatbrim at the man he likewise cussed.

They were a long while there exchanging disagreeable opinions of one another, and Casey was even obliged to climb the steep bank and whip the driver of the Ford because he had applied a word to Casey which had never failed as automatic prelude to a Casey Ryan combat.  Casey was frankly winded when he finally mounted one of his horses and led the other three, and so proceeded to Lund as mad as he had ever been in his life.