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He sat there looking at us, and he saw, of course, that he had been mistaken. He grew very red, and said:

“I’ve been an idiot, of course. If you will allow me to apologize—-“

“Don’t talk,” Tish snapped. “You have all you can do without any conversation. Did you ever drive a car before?”

“Not through a haystack,” he said in a sulky voice.

But Tish fixed him with a glittering eye, and he started the engine.

Well, he got the car backed and turned around, and we followed him through the stubble as the car bumped and rocked along. But at the edge of the creek he stopped and turned around.

“Look here,” he said. “This is suicide. This car will never do it.”

“It has just done it,” Tish replied, inexorably. “Go on.”

“I might get down, but I’ll never get up the other side.”

“Go on.”

“Tish!” Aggie cried, anguished. “He may be killed, and you’ll be responsible.”

Aggie is a sentimental creature, and the young man was very good-looking. Indeed, arriving at the brink, I myself had qualms. But Tish has a will of iron, and was, besides, still rankling with insult. She merely glued her eye again to the sight of the gun on my shoulder, and said:

“Go on!”

Well, he got the car down somehow or other, but nothing would make it climb the other side. It would go up a few feet and then slide back. And at last Tish herself saw that it was hopeless, and told him to turn and go down the creek bed.

It was a very rough creek bed, and one of the springs broke almost at once. We followed along the bank, and I think Tish found a sort of grim humor in seeing the young man bouncing up into the air and coming down on the wheel, for I turned once and found her smiling faintly. However, she merely called to him to be careful of the other springs or she would have to ask him to pay for them.

He stopped then, in a pool about two feet deep, and glared up at her.

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I suppose the fact that I have permanently bent in my floating ribs on this infernal wheel doesn’t matter.”

At last he came to a shelving bank, and got the car out. I think he contemplated making a run for it then and getting away, but Tish observed that she would shoot into the rear tires if he did so. So he went back to the road, slowly, and there stopped the car.

However, Tish was not through with him. She made him climb the chestnut tree and bring down her dress skirt, and then turn his back while she put it on. By that time, the young man was in a chastened mood, and he apologized handsomely.

“But I think I have made amends, ladies,” he said. “I feel that I shall never be the same again. When I started out today I was a blithe young thing, feeling life in every limb, as the poet says. Now what I feel in every limb does not belong in verse. May I have the shotgun, please?”

But Tish had no confidence in him, and we took the gun with us, arranging to leave it at the first signpost, about a mile away. We left him there, and Aggie reported that he stood in the road staring after us as long as we were in sight.

Tish drove the car home after all, steering with one hand and taking the wheel off a buggy on the way. I sat beside her and changed the gears, and she blamed the buggy wheel on me, owing to my going into reverse when I meant to go ahead slowly. The result was that we began to back unexpectedly, and the man only saved his horse by jumping him over a watering trough.

I have gone into this incident with some care, because the present narrative concerns itself with the young man we met, and with the secret in Tish’s barn. At the time, of course, it seemed merely one of the unpleasant things one wishes to forget quickly. Tish’s arm was only sprained, and although Aggie wore adhesive plaster around her ribs almost all winter, because she was afraid to have it pulled off, there were no permanent ill effects.