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Page 4
She let Jack have the car only because she believed that he was going
to take a party of young Christian Endeavorers up Mount Wilson to view
the city after dark. She could readily apprehend that such a sight
might be inspiring, and that it would act as a spur upon the worthy
ambitions of the young men, urging them to great achievements. Mrs.
Singleton Corey had plenty of enthusiasm for the betterment of young
lives, but she had a humanly selfish regard for the immaculateness of
her new automobile, and she feared that the roads on the mountain
might be very dusty and rough, and that overhanging branches might
snag the top. Jack had to promise that he would be very careful of
overhanging branches.
Poor lady, she never dreamed that her son was out at Venice gamboling
on the beach with bold hussies in striped bathing trunks and no
skirts; fox-trotting with a brown-eyed imp from the telephone office,
and drinking various bottled refreshments--carousing shamelessly, as
she would have said of a neighbor's son--or that, at one-thirty in the
morning, he was chewing a strong-flavored gum to kill the odor of
alcohol.
She was not sitting up waiting for him and wondering why he did not
come. Jack had been careful to impress upon her that the party might
want to view the stars until very late, and that he, of course, could
not hurry them down from the mountain top.
You will see then why Jack was burdened with a sense of deep
responsibility for the car, and why he drove almost as circumspectly
as if he were sober, and why he would not join in the hilarity of the
party.
"Hist! Here comes a flivver!" warned the young man on the front seat,
waving his revolver backward to impress silence on the others. "Let's
_all_ shoot! Make 'em think they've run into a mess of tacks!"
"Aw, take a wheel off their tin wagon!" a laughter-hoarse voice
bettered the plan.
"Hold 'em up and take a nickel off 'em--if they carry that much on
their persons after dark," another suggested.
"You're on, bo! This is a hold-up. Hist!"
A hold-up they proceeded to make it. They halted the little car with a
series of explosions as it passed. The driver was alone, and as he
climbed out to inspect his tires, he confronted what looked to his
startled eyes like a dozen masked men. Solemnly they went through his
pockets while he stood with his hands high above him. They took his
half-plug of chewing tobacco and a ten-cent stick-pin from his tie,
and afterwards made him crank his car and climb back into the seat and
go on. He went--with the throttle wide open and the little car loping
down the boulevard like a scared pup.
"Watch him went!" shrieked one they called Hen, doubling himself
together in a spasm of laughter.
"'He was--here--when we _started_, b-but he was--gone--when we got
th'ough!'" chanted another, crudely imitating a favorite black-faced
comedian.
Jack, one arm thrown across the wheel, leaned out and looked back,
grinning under the red band stretched across the middle of his face.
"Ah, pile in!" he cried, squeezing his gum between his teeth and
starting the engine. "He might come back with a cop."
That tickled them more than ever. They could hardly get back into the
car for laughing. "S-o-m-e little bandits!--what?" they asked one
another over and over again.
"S-o-m-e little bandits is--right!" the approving answer came
promptly.
"S-o-m-e _time_, bo, s-o-m-e _time!_" a drink-solemn voice croaked in
a corner of the big seat.
Thus did the party of Christian Endeavorers return sedately from their
trip to Mount Wilson.
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