"Huh! Such an auto! Look, it break my harness a'ready! Two dollar that
cost you to mend it. De auto iss too heavy!" stormed Zolzac.
"All right! All right! Only for heaven's sake--go get another harness!"
Claire shrieked.
"Fife-fifty dot will be, in all." Zolzac grinned.
Claire was standing in front of him. She was thinking of other drivers,
poor people, in old cars, who had been at the mercy of this
golden-hearted one. She stared past him, in the direction from which she
had come. Another motor was in sight.
It was a tin beetle of a car; that agile, cheerful, rut-jumping model
known as a "bug"; with a home-tacked, home-painted tin cowl and tail
covering the stripped chassis of a little cheap Teal car. The lone
driver wore an old black raincoat with an atrocious corduroy collar, and
a new plaid cap in the Harry Lauder tartan. The bug skipped through mud
where the Boltwoods' Gomez had slogged and rolled. Its pilot drove up
behind her car, and leaped out. He trotted forward to Claire and Zolzac.
His eyes were twenty-seven or eight, but his pink cheeks were twenty,
and when he smiled--shyly, radiantly--he was no age at all, but eternal
boy. Claire had a blurred impression that she had seen him before, some
place along the road.
"Stuck?" he inquired, not very intelligently. "How much is Adolph
charging you?"
"He wants three-fifty, and his harness broke, and he wants two
dollars----"
"Oh! So he's still working that old gag! I've heard all about Adolph. He
keeps that harness for pulling out cars, and it always busts. The last
time, though, he only charged six bits to get it mended. Now let me
reason with him."
The young man turned with vicious quickness, and for the first time
Claire heard pidgin German--German as it is spoken between Americans who
have never learned it, and Germans who have forgotten it: "Schon sex hundred times Ich höre all about the way you been doing
autos, Zolzac, you verfluchter Schweinhund, and I'll set the sheriff
on you----"
"Dot ain'd true, maybe einmal die Woche kommt somebody and Ich muss
die Arbeit immer lassen und in die Regen ausgehen, und seh' mal how
die boots sint mit mud covered, two dollars it don't pay for die
boots----"
"Now that's enough-plenty out of you, seien die boots verdammt, and
mach' dass du fort gehst--muddy boots, hell!--put mal ein egg in
die boots and beat it, verleicht maybe I'll by golly arrest you
myself, weiss du! I'm a special deputy sheriff."
The young man stood stockily. He seemed to swell as his somewhat muddy
hand was shaken directly at, under, and about the circumference of,
Adolph Zolzac's hairy nose. The farmer was stronger, but he retreated.
He took up the reins. He whined, "Don't I get nothing I break de
harness?"