Elihu Titus then breathed a long sigh and went silently to curry a horse in a neighbouring box stall.  He knew when to talk and when not to.  But Wilbur Cowan, wishing motor cars were in build more like linotypes, fearlessly opened the hood.

“My shining stars!” murmured Sharon at this his first view of his car’s more intimate devices.  “She’s got innards like a human, ain’t she?” He instantly beheld a vision of the man in the front of the almanac whose envelope is neatly drawn back to reveal his complicated structure in behalf of the zodiacal symbols.  “It’s downright gruesome,” he added.  But his guest was viewing the neat complexities of metal with real pleasure and with what seemed to the car’s owner a practiced and knowing eye.

“Understand ’em?” demanded Sharon.

The boy hesitated.  What he wished more than anything was freedom to take the thing apart, all that charming assemblage of still warm metal and pipes and wires.  He wanted to know what was inside of things, what made them go, and—­to be sure—­what had made them stop.

“Well, I could if I had a chance,” he said at last.

“You got it,” said Sharon.  “Spend all your born days on the old cadaver if you’re so minded.”  Already to Sharon it was an old car.  He turned away from the ghastly sight, but stopped for a final warning:  “But don’t you ever tell anybody.  I ain’t wanting this to get out on me.”

“No, sir,” said Wilbur.

“Maybe we ought to——­” began Sharon, but broke off his speech with a hearty cough.  He was embarrassed, because he had been on the point of suggesting that they call Doc Mumford.  Doc Mumford was the veterinary.  The old man withdrew.  Elihu Titus appeared dimly in the background.

“Ain’t she one gosh-awful crazy hellion?” he called softly to Wilbur, and returned to the horse, whose mechanism was understandable.

The boy was left sole physician to the ailing monster.  He drew a long breath of gloating and fell upon it.  For three days he lived in grimed, greased, and oiled ecstasy, appeasing that sharp curiosity to know what was inside of things.  The first day he took down the engine bit by bit.  The clean-swept floor about the dismantled hulk was a spreading turmoil of parts.  Sharon, on cool afterthought, had conceived that his purchase might not have suffered beyond repair, but returning to survey the wreck, had thrown up his fat hands in a gesture of hopeless finality.

“That does settle it,” he murmured.  He pointed to the scattered members.  “How in time did you ever find all them fiddlements in that little space?” Of course no one could ever put them back.

He picked up the book that had come with the car, a book falsely pretending to elucidate its mechanism, even to minor intelligences.  The book was profuse in diagrams, and each diagram was profuse in letters of the alphabet, but these he found uninforming.  For the maker of the car had unaccountably neglected to put A, B, or C on the parts themselves, which rendered the diagrams but maddening puzzles.  He threw down the book, to watch the absorbed young mechanic who was frankly puzzled but still hopeful.