"I shall never forget my emotions at the time," Gifford Barrett was saying to Billy. "I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower. The road was all up and down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the other. She had lost both her pedals, and you've no idea how she looked, bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind. She hadn't even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn't an atom of romance in the affair from first to last. She was a great, overgrown country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and arms and a skull. What do you suppose she could have been doing with them? She was too young and fair to have been an undertaker." "They might have belonged to her ancestors, and she have been taking them home for burial," Hubert suggested. Mr. Barrett chuckled in a manner which suggested the composer in him had not entirely ousted the boy. "Anyway, she is short a skull. I sent out, the next day, and had it brought to me. I have it yet." "Did she hit you?" Theodora asked. "Hit me! I should think she did. She was large, and she came at me with a good deal of force. The last I remember, I felt the crash, and I knew I had had the worst of it." He rubbed his arm sympathetically at the recollection. "What became of you?" Mrs. McAlister inquired. "Did she pick you up and carry you home?" "Not she. She was an Amazon, not a Valkyrie within hailing distance of Valhalla." "Who was she?" Theodora asked. "The story ought to have a sequel." "It hasn't. It ended in mystery. The girl vanished into thin air, and a man, driving by, found me lying in the mud, with a skull on one side of me and a white sailor hat on the other, neither of them my property." "Just rode away and left you with a compound fracture?" The doctor's tone was incredulous. "Apparently, for she was never heard of again; at least, I never found out who she was. It was very funny and very unromantic; but it laid me up for a few weeks, and my arm doesn't grow strong as fast as it should, so I have to be careful of it. No swimming or golf for me, this year. Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear of a buxom damsel who lacks one skull and one white straw Knox hat, size six and one-eighth. Then, when I meet her, I shall take my vengeance." "I hope you will find her," the doctor said vindictively. "If one of my daughters had done such a thing, I would disown her. Babe, it is growing chilly. I wish you'd bring out some rugs." But Phebe had vanished from her seat in the doorway.