The Wrong Twin eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 454 pages of information about The Wrong Twin.

The Wrong Twin eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 454 pages of information about The Wrong Twin.

But the crowd ceased to regard him, for now a slight boyish figure—­none other than that of Wilbur Cowan—­leaped to the seat, performed swift motions, grasped the fateful wheel, and made the bus roar.  The smell of burned gasoline affronted the pretty garden.  Wheels revolved savagely among the bruised roots of innocent pansies.  Grandma Dodwell screamed anew.  Then slowly, implacably hesitant, ponderous but determined, the huge bus backed along the track it had so cruelly worn in the sward—­out through the gap in the fair fence, over the side-walk and into the road, rocking perilously, but settling level at last.  Thereupon the young hero had done something else with mysterious handles, and the bus glided swiftly on to the depot, making the twelve-two in ample time.

Great moments are vouchsafed only to those souls fortified to survive them.  To one who had tamed the proud spirit of Sharon Whipple’s hellion it was but lightsome child’s play to guide this honest and amiable new bus.  To the Mansion he returned in triumph with a load of passengers, driving with zest, and there receiving from villagers inflamed by tales of his prowess an ovation that embarrassed him with its heartiness.  He hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard.  Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker.  That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove.  He refused to be comforted by his devotee.  He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man’s money.  The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution.  Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age.  Unable to adapt himself, he would see the Mansion’s stable become a noisome garage, while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to a few remaining horses.

Wilbur Cowan guided the Mansion’s bus for two days.  He longed for it as a life work, but school was on and he was not permitted to abandon this, even for a glorious life at the wheel.  There came a youth in neat uniform to perform this service—­described by Starling Tucker as a young squirt that wouldn’t know one end of a hawse from the other.  Only on Saturdays—­on Saturdays openly and clandestinely on Sundays—­was there present on the driver’s seat a knowing amateur who could have sat there every day but for having unreasonably to learn about compound fractions and geography.

CHAPTER X

Now school was over for another summer and Trimble Cushman’s dray could be driven at a good wage—­by a boy overnight become a man.  There were still carpers who would regard him as a menace to life and limb.  Judge Penniman was among these.  A large truck in sole charge of a boy—­still in his teens, as the judge put it—­was not conducive to public tranquillity.  But this element

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Project Gutenberg
The Wrong Twin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.