your childish prejudices for a minute and examine it.

"Let us suppose that this brake is fitted to a fiery saddle-horse. The
rider has lost all control. In another minute, unless he can stop the
beast, he will be dashed to the ground and kicked into pulp. What does he
do? Simply pulls this lever--thus! The animal can't budge!"

An uncanny clankety-clankety-clank accompanied his words, and the rods
dropped suddenly. In their descent they somehow managed to gather two
steel cuffs apiece.

When they ceased dropping, Maud S. had a steel bar down the back of each
leg, with a cuff above and a cuff below the knee. Hawkins was quite right--
so far as I could see; Maud was anchored until some well-disposed person
brought a hack-saw and cut off her shackles.

"You see how it acts when she is standing still?" chuckled the inventor,
replacing the rods. "Just keep your eyes open and note the suddenness with
which she stops running."

"Hawkins," I cried, despairingly, as he led the animal up the road, "don't
go to all that trouble on my account. I can see perfectly that the thing
is a success. Don't try it again."

"My dear Griggs," said Hawkins, coldly, "this trial trip is for my own
personal satisfaction, not yours. To tell the truth, I had no idea that
you or any one else would be here to witness my triumph."

He went perhaps three or four hundred feet up the road; then he turned
Maud's nose homeward and clambered to her back.