“‘Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,’ says the fond father.  ‘What’s that?’ he yells, for the boy was talking again.  He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his face work as the words come along.  It registered all the evil that Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up the name for it.  Finally he begun to splutter back—­it must have sounded fine at the other end—­but he had to hang up, he was that emotional.  After he got his face human again he says to us: 

“’Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have been his dying speech?  Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still husky enough to get by with it?  Well, you’d guess wild.  He’s but inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he passed out for some minutes.  He says it’s a disgrace to any civilized community, and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who must be a murderer at heart, and then he’ll take it up to the supreme court and see if we can’t have roads in this country as good as Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it scarce dry.  He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it—­but I hung up on him.  My strength was waning.  Was he here this minute I make no doubt I’d go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.’  He dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he’d say to the boy if he was to come to the door.

“Then dear Ellabelle pipes up:  ’And doesn’t the dear boy say who was with him in this prank?’

“Angus snorted horribly at the word ‘prank,’ just like he’d never had one single advantage of foreign travel.  ’He does indeed—­one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him—­the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather—­and praise God his bones, at least, are broke in two places!’

“Ellabelle’s eyes shined up at this with real delight.  ‘How terrible!’ she says, not looking it.  ’That’s Gerald Hammersmith, son of Mrs. St. John Hammersmith, leader of the most exclusive set here—­oh, she’s quite in the lead of everything that has class!  And after this we must know each other far, far better than we have in the past.  She has never called up to this time.  I must inquire after her poor boy directly to-morrow comes.’  That is Ellabelle.  Trust her not to overlook a single bet.