Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1916)

106 Pickles and Pearls can't take a chance on you. I have been taken in too many times by " Buzz-z-z! It was the self-starter getting into action. Clank! The control slipped into "low," and the clutch came in with a jerk. "Stop, I tell you!" yelled Leeson. "You'll find this car in Boggsville," shouted Charlie, "and you can keep the hundred !" The wheels ground complainingly as the control went over to second speed, then no more than whispered as they meshed in "high." Charlie, the undaunted, was off like a streak along the main street. Ten miles was the speed limit within the corporate limits of Lawton, and Charlie was going thirty, if he was going one. A policeman got in front of the car, and raised his club. A second later, he dropped the club as he jumped to keep from being run down. The outskirts of the little city whirled past the roadster, and Charlie came out into the peaceful country, flanked with woods on one side of the road and the railway track on the other. He swept by De Vere, tugging at the levers of the handcar, and flung him a mocking, defiant laugh. De Vere, startled by the laugh, lifted his bent form to stare at the racing car in the wagon road. He shook his fist at his former comrade. Charlie barely caught that menacing gesture out of the tails of his eyes, when De Vere and the handcar were swallowed up in the distance behind. At Hooperton, the next station, a chain was stretched across the road. Evidently the garage men had telephoned from Lawton, and Charlie was expected. Hooperton was a village. The chain was stretched between posts planted at the edge of board walks reserved for pedestrians. On one of the walks stood a constable, with a large and prominent star on the breast of his coat. This official waved a heavy cane. But did Charlie stop ? Not at all. He knew how to drive a car with judgment and skill, and he simply turned the machine to the walk, rattled over the boards, and came into the road again beyond the chain. In his haste to dodge disaster, the constable backed into the window of the village store, and, when Charlie vanished across the sky line, the storekeeper was out in front, giving the constable a piece of his mind. Right merrily, Charlie kept to his winning clip. At the rate he was going, he ought to arrive in Boggsville by one o'clock, with two full hours in which to return the tiara and convince Silas McTodd that the prospective wedding was a mistake. Motor cars, however, are noted for proving unreliable in a pinch ; and this pinch of Charlie's gave the roadster an opportunity to go wrong. Suddenly there was a sputtering, a few ineffective explosions, and the engine gasped and went out of business. Charlie got down and looked things over. No matter how much one may know about an automobile, when the crisis arrives, and the motor refuses to mote, any one of five thousand things may have happened, and it is always the last thing you look for that has stalled the machine. Patiently, Charlie began going through the list of troubles that might have caused the car to go wrong. Minute after minute slipped away. With feverish energy, Charlie pursued his diagnosis, but he probed and pottered to no avail. After nearly an hour of unrewarded effort, during which he spoke harshly of all motor cars in general, and of that one in particular, he found a loose brass pin dangling from the end of a rubber cord. As he slipped the pin back into its socket and prepared to resume his journey, the pur of another machine struck on his ears. He looked back along the road over