“‘You crazy loon!’ I screeched.  ’You—­you—­you—­Stop it!  Take your foot off that!  Do you want to—!’

“I was climbin’ over the back of the front seat, my knee pretty nigh on Bradbury’s head.  But, would you believe it, that Jonadab man let go of the wheel with one hand—­let go of it, mind you—­and give me a shove that sent me backward in Henrietta Bassett’s lap.

“‘Barzilla!’ he growled, between his teeth, ’you set where you be and keep off the quarterdeck.  I’m runnin’ this craft.  I’ll beat that Loveland this time or run him under, one or t’other!’

“As sure as I’m alive this minute, the man in the front car was Tobias Loveland!

“And from then on—­Don’t talk!  I dream about it nights and wake up with my arms around the bedpost.  I ain’t real sure, but I kind of have an idee that the bedpost business comes from the fact that I was huggin’ the widow some of the time.  If I did, ’twa’n’t knowin’ly, and she never mentioned it afterwards.  All I can swear to is clouds of dust, and horns honkin’, and telegraph poles lookin’ like teeth in a comb, and Jonadab’s face set as the Day of Judgment.

“He kept his foot down on the speed place as if ’twas glued.  He shoved the ’spark’—­whatever that is—­’way back.  Every once in a while he yelled, yelled at the top of his lungs.  What he yelled hadn’t no sense to it.  Sometimes you’d think that he was drivin’ a horse and next that he was handlin’ a schooner in a gale.

“‘Git dap!’ he’d whoop.  ’Go it, you cripples!  Keep her nose right in the teeth of it!  She’s got the best of the water, so let her bile!  Whe-E-E!’

“We didn’t stop at Bayport.  Our skipper had made other arrangements.  However, the way I figgered it, we was long past needin’ a doctor, and you can get an undertaker ’most anywhere.  We went through the village like a couple of shootin’ stars, Tobias about a length ahead, his hat blowed off, his hair—­what little he’s got—­streamin’ out behind, and that blessed red buzz wagon of his fairly skimmin’ the hummocks and jumpin’ the smooth places.  And right astern of him comes Jonadab, hangin’ to the wheel, his hat gone, his mouth open, and fillin’ the dust with yells and coughs.

“You could see folks runnin’ to doors and front gates; but you never saw ’em reach where they was goin’—­time they done that we was somewheres round the next bend.  A pullet run over us once—­yes, I mean just that.  She clawed the top of the widow’s bunnit as we slid underneath her, and by the time she lit we was so fur away she wa’n’t visible to the naked eye.  Bradbury—­who’d got better remarkable sudden—­was pawin’ at Jonadab’s arm, tryin’ to make him ease up; but he might as well have pawed the wind.  As for Henrietta Bassett, she was acrost the back of the front seat tootin’ the horn for all she was wuth.  And curled down in a heap on the cockpit floor was a fleshy, sea-farin’ person by the name of Barzilla Wingate, sufferin’ from chills and fever.