"Yes, and you'll break your fool neck some day," said Early Ann. "He pretty near went off the Busseyville bridge with me on behind last night." "Peter, you must be careful," his mother said. "Tattle-tale," said Peter. He kicked Early Ann's shins under the table, and she kicked back. "Me for an Imperial," said Gus. "They're twenty years ahead of their time and the classiest looking buggies you ever hope to see." But in the end, of course, they bought a Ford, and a second hand one at that, with brass braces in front and a figure that only an owner could love. It stood up in the air like a lumber wagon, and you could hear it coming for a mile. It boiled over at eighteen miles an hour, but that was all right because the worse they boiled the better they went. Stud shined the brass radiator until it glittered like the gilded roof of Solomon's Temple. Sunday was spent in tinkering with the magneto, the lighting system, and the carburettor--that was what finally wrecked the Sabbath day. You had to hold your thumb just right in cranking the thing to avoid a broken arm, and when the engine finally decided to perambulate the whole body shook like a dish of crab-apple jelly. Stud had the appearance of a circus giant cramped over the steering wheel. He had difficulty in manipulating the trio of pedals with his large feet, and the idiosyncrasies of the spark and gas kept him guessing, but he whooped it up and down the road like a youngster with his first bicycle, and Sarah held on beside him, game as a Red Cross nurse in the face of inevitable death. Sarah purchased a linen duster and motoring veil. Stud bought himself a pair of motor-goggles and a linen cap which he wore like Barney Oldfield with the visor in back. The entire family grew suddenly sensitive to Ford jokes. Unfortunately, farming, even in those halcyon days, was not all driving the Ford; and so despite races between Peter and Stud,--the motorcycle versus the tin lizzy,--platonic midnight excursions by Gus in the borrowed motorcar, and thrilling family forays about the countryside, work went on as usual about the farm. Crops were better than could have been expected. Some parts of the great Middle West suffered floods in the spring of that year and drought in the late summer, but on the Brailsford farm rains and sunny weather were neatly interspersed. The pumpkin vines opened their yellow flowers in corn which was waist-high by the fourth of July. The moisture kept the tobacco from spindling up too soon; it spread wide leaves of velvet green in rows which went as straight as arrows across the fertile north twenty.