cheeks, "that a car hit you and pushed you into the ditch and didn't even stop? Why, that's an outrage? I tell you, maniacs like that ought not to be allowed to have cars, let alone drive them around the country that way, endangering in that reckless way the lives of innocent people!"
They assisted Pa to right the small tin automobile and saw it wheeze off unharmed, fluttering hands of divers sizes from all sides. "Now warn't they nice?" Ma was sighing gratefully. She would remember them for the rest of her life as a quartet of Good Samaritans.
About seven o'clock, just as they neared a sizable city, hunger assailed them. "Shall we pay," queried Pink, "or shall we not pay?"
"Not!" chorused the others vigorously.
Their ensuing conduct was a triumph in strategy. First they paused at a second-hand shop and purchased two more suitcases, dilapidated ones, for a pittance. These they packed with empty oilcans and filthy cotton waste begged from the garage where they stored the roadster, until tentative lifting convinced them that the proper degree of heaviness had been attained. Then Jock and Dopey Lane, each carrying one of these suitcases, approached the largest and best hotel of the town and demanded a room in the grand manner. Having registered under the names (but not the titles) of the science professor and the Dean of their college, they were conducted to an excellent double room with bath on the second floor.
Scarcely had they concluded a pseudo battle as to which should be privileged to tip the bellboy—a battle staged for the bellboy's benefit and rendered somewhat anticlimactical by the tip itself, which proved to be a nickel on sight and a plugged nickel on his attempt to
