"I hope it wasn't a
bad break."
"A compound fracture of the right arm," he replied. "It wasn't a pleasing
break; but it was a good deal more pleasing than the way it happened."
"How was that?" Billy looked up expectantly, for the young man's tone was
suggestive of a story yet untold.
Gifford Barrett laughed.
"It was very absurd, very ignominious; but the fact is, I was run into
by a woman, one day in a pelting shower, and knocked heels over head off
my bicycle."
Sitting in the doorway, Phebe had been holding a book in her hands. Now
it fell to the floor with a crash.
"Drop something, Babe?" Hubert asked amicably.
"Yes, my book," she answered shortly.
"I shall never forget my emotions at the time," Gifford Barrett was
saying to Billy. "I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was
caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower. The road was all up and
down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the
other. She had lost both her pedals, and you've no idea how she looked,
bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind.
She hadn't even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn't an atom of
romance in the affair from first to last. She was a great, overgrown
country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I
took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped
open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and
arms and a skull.
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