Gus Wilson, half owner of the Model
Garage, had about decided to call it a day when his partner Joe Clark called
him to the window.
"What's the idea of the fancy
decorations?" Joe asked, pointing to a small sedan that was coming slowly
down the road. The car certainly looked queer. Scraps of paper and strings
of various colors fluttered in the breeze. A short piece of brown paper was
wrapped around the front axle and the remains of a burlap bag dragged from
the rear bumper.
Gus gazed at it wonderingly, but
before he had time to make a reply the car swung in and came in a bucking
halt in front of the garage. Immediately there came a loud hissing sound,
clouds of steam poured out of the openings in the hood, and a torrent of
steaming water rained down and formed a pool under the motor.
The two garage men came out in time
to see the owner pop out of the car and shake his fist at the offending
radiator.
"Sacre!" he yelled. "After
all these mile' I have driven you little pig, you try to push the van full
of the rubbish from the road - and see what happen? Jules Marceau, he
punish you!" And he backed up his threat with a vigorous kick administered
to the unoffending front tire.
Gus calmed the excited little man
and led him into the office. "Tell us what happened, Mr. Marceau," he
suggested. "Perhaps it is a little bit my fault," Mareau began, his wrath
rapidly evaporating. "I take Marie to the shops this afternoon and I wait
for the traffic light behind a grand big track filled with bags of the
rubbish. A bee jump through the window and he sit on my knee. I slap, and
my foot it leave - how you call, the clutch - and my car it jump right into
the rubbish wagon. The rubbish it come down all over me and the radiator
get bust. Is it not what you call bad luck?"
Gus grinned. "Bad luck and poor
management," he observed. "If you hadn't had the car in gear, you could
have taken a poke at the bee without having your car jump ahead.
"Of course, lots of drivers put the
gears in first speed when they stop in traffic and keep their feet on the
clutch pedals waiting for the signal to go ahead. But you shouldn't do
that. Anything that happens to make you move suddenly - like the bee that
landed on your knee or maybe a hot cigar ash falling on your hand or even a
little cramp in your leg muscle - is going to make you take your foot off
the clutch pedal and slam into whatever is ahead of you. You're lucky you
weren't at the head of the line with a lot of people walking across the
street a foot or two from your bumper. You might have killed somebody.
"Besides," he continued, "you're
putting a lot of extra work on the clutch throwout bearing when you stand in
first gear with the clutch pedal down."
"But I do not stand in the first
gear," Marceau protested. "I am such a good driver I do not need the first
speed. Mr. Always I start in the middle speed."
"Humph!" the veteran auto mechanic
grunted. "If you start in second all the time, I'll bet your clutch lining
is pretty near wore out already. Starting in second is bum dope unless you
have a four-speed transmission with first geared so low that it isn't any
use. Let's take a look at that car."
They pushed it inside and Gus
investigated the extent of the damage.
"Not so bad," he said. I'll fix
the supports and put on a new hose connection and it'll be all right except
for that dent in the hood. I'll roll that out, too, if you'll bring it in
tomorrow."
As with every car that came into
the place, Gus inspected it to see if any vital part was out of order. He
poked at the brake pedal, thumbed the horn button, fingered a broken spot in
the windshield wiper hose, and squinted at the wheel alignment.
"Looks to me like you had a few
other little jobs here, Mr. Marceau," he said. "The brakes need taking up,
the horn doesn't work and the windshield wiper is out of commission."
"Poof!" exclaimed Marceau waving
his fingers expressively. "The brakes you should fix, yes but these other
little things are as nothing. I do not like the sound of the horn and never
do I drive in the rain."
"Maybe so" Gus growled. "But if
you ever meet an inspector he'll think different. Blowing a horn all the
time is silly business, but there's times when the horn may save some
child's life or your own. As for the windshield wiper, you must be some
weather prophet if you can be sure you're never going to be caught in a
driving rainstorm at night!"
"I have not think of it so," said
Marceau, "It is the one time in the thousand that the noise maker is
necessary. That is true! Fix it at once! Never will I take the chance
again. And the scrubber of the windshield also."
"That's the way to talk, said Gus
with a smile. "With all the cars that are around today, everybody's got to
keep his machine right or pretty soon there'll be a lot of new inspectors on
the road just looking for defects like that. A little while ago they
stopped a lot of cars in another state and nearly a quarter of 'em had bum
lights that couldn't pass inspection."
"Inspect mine please," Marceau
suggested and grinned with pleasure when Gus found them in good shape.
"You see it's this way, Mr. Marceau,"
Gus went on as he set about adjusting the car. "Today the roads are jammed
with cars. You'll meet hundreds on a trip for every ten you met a few years
ago. And everywhere the speed laws have been made more reasonable so all
cars travel lots faster now than they used to. I can remember only a few
years back when you got pinched on our boulevard if you went over twenty
miles an hour. Now if you don't move along at thirty when traffic is heavy
you're likely to get a ticket for obstructing the road! Cars are getting
more powerful. Weights are not going down. To balance that we've got
four-wheel brakes and big tires that get a good grip on the road. The
higher speeds of today really are safer than the slower speeds of yesterday,
if - and that's a great big if - everything about the car is working as it
should.
"There's a bit of talk right now
about condemning all cars over a certain age and putting them off the road.
We may come to that in the end, but it always seemed to me like a kind of
silly way to look at it. Maybe the people who keep preparing it will get
the straight of it after a while. It isn't the age of a car that makes it
safe or not. What counts is its conditions. A five-year-old car in perfect
shape is a lot safer bet than one two months old with the brakes out of
whack and a lot of other things the matter with it," Gus continued as he
finished the brakes and started on the next job.
"Aha, my little cabbage!" whispered
Marceau, petting the crumpled mudguard of his car affectionately. "Me, I
will make very sure they do not condemn you, little one. Beginning with the
now we will have your ills fixed at once, or before that, even!"
END
