“When both the brakes are braking, And the rattling doors are shaking, And you sit upon the bare springs in the seat; Will you love me like you uster, When she’s crowing like a rooster, And the oilcloth cushions look like shredded wheat?” CHAPTER XXVIII ADVENTURES WITH A FLIVVER—CONTINUED Townsend would never sing any of these verses when Pee-wee wanted him to. Pee-wee’s appetite for them soon became voracious. It was usually when something went wrong (which was about every ten minutes) that Townsend would edify his small companion with a new verse while making some small repair or adjustment. At such trying moments his affection for the car seemed to pass all bounds. His plaintive query would then take wings and his loving soul burst into song, greatly to Pee-wee’s amusement. The flivver ran true to form to a point a mile or two south of Kingston, keeping up a series of weird noises which Townsend called the _Orphans of the Storm_ chorus, the uncanny sounds being caused by the flivver’s recent exposure to the rain. He then predicted new squeaks which would soon join in the chorus and they did. They were stopped once by a rural official who was on a hay wagon, with a vast load of hay as a pedestal for his dignity. Townsend, for the fun of the thing, kept tooting his horn for the hay load to get out of the way (a thing manifestly impossible), upon its failure to do which he drove up close behind it to give Pee-wee a demonstration of how the Ford could eat hay by drawing it in through the radiator openings. The flivver’s mouth was about full of this luscious refreshment, the hay streaming out of it, when the driver emerged over the mountainous load and demanded to know, “Who told you you cud drive a car anyways, I’d liketerknow.” “No one had to tell us,” said Townsend; “we always knew it.” Upon which, presto, a strand of green suspender was drawn aside, like a boudoir curtain, revealing a coy and modest official badge on the gingham shirt. Upon which, presto, out came Justice Dopett’s letter, which drove the constable back into the fastness of his hay load again. Townsend quietly got out and pulled the hay out of the radiator openings, and that was the end of the incident. It proved, however, but the suggestive prelude to a series of troubles. Indeed, the nearer they approached to Kingston the farther away it seemed. They had a puncture, then a blow-out, then a detour. And scarcely had they regained the main road in the neighborhood of the New Paltz and Highland Turnpike, when something happened which was beyond Townsend’s ministrative powers; the Ford went wrong in a new and wholly original place. “That’s one thing I like about her,” he said, as he closed the hood after a fruitless inspection. “When anything goes wrong that I can’t fix, it always happens near a garage. This seems to be the fan belt.”