“We’ve had a bum ride in your bum wagon,” he said, “and now you’ve stuck us down here nine miles from the nearest beer!  You’ve a lot to answer for, you have.”

“I shall certainly return your money,” returned Grace coldly.  “I can’t do more than that, can I?”

“Oh, yes, you can, you wicked little chafer,” he said, giving a wink over his shoulder to his companions.  “What’s the matter with a kiss?” And with that he passed his arm around her waist.

What happened next happened quicker than it takes to write it.  The farmer’s right hand descended on the young man’s collar, and his left executed a succession of slaps on the young man’s countenance, which, for vigor and swiftness, could not have been done better by machinery.  Then he trailed him to one side of the road, still shaking him in an iron grasp, and kicked him into the ditch.

“Help!” roared the young man repeatedly in the course of these proceedings.  “Help!”

This brought to the rescue his two friends, who, for the last instant, had been too spellbound to move.  The farmer squared his fists and received the newcomers on his knuckles.  He was a clean hitter, and from the way he pirouetted and skipped you would have said he could dance, too.  The three young sports, considerably the worse for wear, fled pell-mell for the barbed-wire fence that bordered the road, and went over it in the twinkling of an eye.  Only a few bits of what they would probably have called “nobby pants,” speckled here and there on the barbs, betrayed to later wayfarers this new instance of man’s inhumanity to man.

“Do you know, we have never looked at the contact-box,” said the farmer, returning to the car quite calmly to take up the interrupted thread of his conversation.

The tears were streaming down Grace’s face, and her voice was scarcely controllable.

“It’s a b-brush s-s-system,” she said, “and it has always worked b-b-beautifully, and I never could have f-f-forgiven myself if they had h-h-hurt you!”

The farmer did not hear more than half the sentence.  He was on his knees peering down into the works.  Suddenly he raised his head with an expression of triumph.

Bing!  A stone struck one of the kerosene lamps with a vicious crash.

Bing!  Another just missed the countryman’s rumpled hair.

Bing!  A mud-guard shook with a loud and tinny reverberation.

The enemy, lined up in the neighboring field, and yelling shrilly, were opening up a rear-guard action with artillery.

“The contact-box is upside down,” cried the farmer.  “I can’t see how it ever worked at all.  Yank me out a screw-driver quick!”

The contact-box was on the exposed side.  The farmer tried to hunch himself into the least compass possible, but his broad back and powerful frame interfered with his efforts to make a human hedgehog of himself.  He was hit twice, once by a grazing shot that brought out blood on his cheek, the other a stinger on the hand.