Then Miss Asheton turned a whitely angry face on the Honorable Alexander. She could hardly have confronted him more belligerently had she really been his spouse. “How dared you!” “My dear young lady,” expostulated Mr. Burrow humbly, “you don’t know Jaffa Junction. You arrive unchaperoned. If I had corrected our Calvinistic host, he would have turned us both out like pariahs.” “Will you please drive me to Mercerville?” “Certainly. Direct or—via the County Judge’s?” “Direct—and fast!” said Miss Asheton with decision. “Please consider,” urged the Honorable Alexander. “It is now past midnight. Mercerville is ten hours away either by motor or train. It will be a trifle difficult to explain to aunty.” “It will be a trifle difficult in any event,” sighed Miss Asheton. “On the contrary. I should not feel called upon to make any explanation whatsoever as to the movements of myself and my wife.” Mr. Burrow spoke with some hauteur. The young woman ignored the suggestion. “We will go on,” she said. “The roads are very bad, and one tire is a little weak.” “We will go on.” “You are spoiling the most improved elopement that was ever devised,” sighed the Honorable Alexander mournfully. “It breaks my heart to witness such iconoclasm.” “We will go on,” murmured Miss Asheton mechanically. One hour and a half later, as the car turned a sharp curve, there came a loud report, a sudden jolt and a long-suffering sigh from Mr. Burrow. “That,” he said in a voice of deep resignation, “was the rear, left-hand tire, and I should say that as a blow-out there was some class to it.” CHAPTER VII MR. RAT CONNORS, SAMARITAN When Mr. Rat Connors dropped out of sight over the railroad embankment his ideas of procedure had been somewhat vague. In the United States were some eighty million people. It seemed a fair sporting proposition, and one worth a small bet, that out of that number at least a single individual must have residence in this neighborhood. If he sought hard enough he might find that habitation. Himself, he would have preferred a night’s lodging under the broad and starry skies to a quest of the sort he had undertaken. But the other gentlemen was “in bad” and the tenets of Mr. Rat Connors’ primitive knighthood precluded the possibility of “leavin’ him lay” suffering and unsuccored. The search was, for a while, futile. The timbered hills stretched unbroken in lines of ragged shadow. It was a knob country, surrendered, even in the narrow valleys, to the crawfish and the crow, save for a few scattered cabin-dwellers who cultivated peach orchards on the sterile slopes of the hills. But at last Mr. Connors came upon a sort of trail which seemed to be the poor relation to a road. Mr. Connors set his feet therein and trudged on with what comfort and companionship he could derive from Jay Gould’s Daughter personified in song.