"But look at the tracks," his sister urged. "The machine must have come
right out of the bananas and climbed the bank."

"Some machine to climb a bank like that," was Davies' comment. "What it
did do was to go down the bank--take a scout after it, Charley, while
Wemple and I get Mrs. Morgan off her fractious mount. No machine ever
built could travel far through those bananas."

The flea-bitten roan, on its four legs upstanding, continued bravely to
stand until the lady was removed, whereupon, with a long sigh, it sank
down on the ground. Mrs. Morgan likewise sighed, sat down, and regarded
her tiny feet mournfully.

"Go on, boys," she said. "Maybe you can find something at the river and
send back for me."

But their indignant rejection of the plan never attained speech, for, at
that instant, from the green sea of banana trees beneath them, came the
sudden purr of an engine. A minute later the splutter of an exhaust told
them the silencer had been taken off. The huge-fronded banana trees were
violently agitated as by the threshing of a hidden Titan. They could
identify the changing of gears and the reversing and going ahead, until,
at the end of five minutes, a long low, black car burst from the wall of
greenery and charged the soft earth bank, but the earth was too soft,
and when, two-thirds of the way up, beaten, Charley Drexel braked the
car to a standstill, the earth crumbled from under the tires, and he ran
it down and back, the way he had come, until half-buried in the bananas.

"'A Merry Oldsmobile!'" Miss Drexel quoted from the popular song,