“Too bad.  You oughta be on it, Casey,” Bill said ominously.

At the garage the Barrymores were waiting for him in their stage clothes and make-up.  The show lady had wept seams down through her rouge, and the beads on her lashes had clotted unbecomingly.

“Mister, you certainly have wished a sorry deal on to us,” she exclaimed, when Casey came hobbling through the doorway.  “Fifteen years on the stage and this never happened to us before.  We’ve took our bad luck with our good luck and lived honest and respectable and self-respecting, and here, at last, ill fortune has tied the can on to us.  I know you meant well and all that, Mister, but we certainly have had a raw deal handed out to us in this town.  We—­certainly—­have!”

“We got till noon to-morrow to be outa the county,” croaked Jack dear, shifting his Adam’s apple rapidly.  “And that’s real comedy, ain’t it, when your damn county runs clean over to the Utah line, and we can’t go back the way we come, or—­and we can’t go anywhere till this big slob here puts our car together.  He’s got pieces of it strung from here around the block.  Say, what kinda town is this you wished on to us, anyway?  Holding night court, mind you, so they could can us quicker!”

The show lady must have seen how dazed Casey looked.  “Maybe you ain’t heard the horrible deal they handed us, Mister.  They stopped our show before we’d raised the curtain,—­and it was a seventy-five dollar house if it was a cent!” she wailed.  “They had a bill as long as my arm for license—­we couldn’t get by with the five-dollar one—­and for lights and hall rent and what-all.  There wasn’t enough money in the house to pay it!  And they was going to send us to jail!  The sheriff acted anything but a gentleman, Mister, and if you ever lived in this town and liked it, I must say I question your taste!”

“We wouldn’t use a town like this for a garbage dump, back home,” cut in Jack with all the contempt he could master.

“And they hauled us over to their dirty old Justice of the Peace, and he told us he’d give us thirty days in jail if we was in the county to-morrow noon, and we don’t know how far this county goes, either way!”

“Fifty miles to St. Simon,” Bill told them comfortingly.  “You can make it, all right—­”

“We can make it, hey?  How’re we going to make it, with our car layin’ around all over your garage?” Jack’s tone was arrogant past belief.

Casey was fumbling for strap buckles which he could not reach.  He was also groping through his colorful, stage-driver’s vocabulary for words which might be pronounced in the presence of a lady, and finding mighty few that were of any use to him.  The combined effort was turning him a fine purple when the lady was seized with another brilliant idea.

“Jack dear, don’t be harsh.  The gentleman meant well—­and I’ll tell you, Mister, what let’s do!  Let’s trade cars till the man has our car repaired.  Your car goes just fine, and we can load our stuff in and get away from this horrible town.  Why, the preacher was there and made a speech and said the meanest things about you, because you was having a benefit and at the same identical time you was setting in a saloon gambling.  He said it was an outrage on civilization, Mister, and an insult to the honest, hard-working people in Lund.  Them was his very words.”