“Well, if I do?  Then what?”

“Then you’re crazy,” said Len, without heat, as one would state a self-evident fact.

That afternoon Mrs. Scaritt went down to the office of the Eagle and inserted a neat ad.

     LACE CURTAINS DONE UP LIKE NEW. 25
     CENTS A PR.  MRS. SCARITT, 639 OUTAGAMIE ST.

For years afterward you never passed the Scaritt place without seeing the long skeleton frames of wooden curtain stretchers propped up against the back porch in the sun.  Mrs. Scaritt became famous for her curtains as an artist is known for his middle distances, his woodland green, or his flesh tones.  In time even the Hattons, who had always heretofore sent their fine curtains to Milwaukee to be cleaned, trusted their lacy treasures to Mrs. Scaritt’s expert hands.

Chug went to high school on those lace curtains.  He used to call for and deliver them.  He rigged up a shelf-like device on his bicycle handlebars.  On this the freshly laundered curtains reposed in their neat paper wrappings as unwrinkled as when they had come from the stretching frame.

At seventeen he went to work in the Elite Garage.  He hadn’t been there a month before the owner was saying, “Say, Chug, take a look at this here bus, will you?  She don’t run right but I can’t find out what’s got into her.”

Chug would put his ear to the heart of the car, and tap its vitals, and count its pulse-beats as a doctor sounds you with his stethoscope.  The look on his face was that of a violinist who tries his G-string.

For the rest, he filled gas tanks, changed and pumped up tires, tested batteries, oiled tappets.  But the thing that fascinated him was the engine.  An oily, blue-eyed boy in spattered overalls, he was always just emerging from beneath a car, or crawling under it.  When a new car came in, en route—­a proud, glittering affair—­he always managed to get a chance at it somehow, though the owner or chauffeur guarded it ever so jealously.  The only thing on wheels that he really despised was an electric brougham.  Chippewa’s well-paved streets made these vehicles possible.  Your true garage man’s feeling for electrics is unprintable.  The least that they called them was juice-boxes.

At home Chug was forever rigging up labour-saving devices for his mother.  The Scaritt’s window-shades always rolled; their doorbell always rang with a satisfactory zing; their suction-pump never stuck.  By the time he was twenty Chug was manager of the garage and his mother was saying, “You’re around that garage sixteen hours a day.  When you’re home you’re everlastingly reading those engineering papers and things.  Your pa at your age had a girl for every night in the week and two on Sundays.”

“Another year or so and I can buy out old Behnke and own the place.  Soon’s I do I’m going to come home in the speediest boat in the barn, and I’m going to bust up those curtain frames into kindling wood, over my knee, and pile ’em in the backyard and make a bonfire out of ’em.”