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of such a machine in the newspaper. It was an ordinary, or a bicycle, as they were coming to be called. The advertisement had claimed it could distance the best horse in a day's run, although seeing one now, Clementine wondered how a person even managed to stay astraddle of it.
    The monstrous front wheel of this ordinary was nose-high to a man. Connected to it by a curved pipelike rod was a small trailer wheel the size of a plate. The wheelman perched on a tiny leather saddle atop the big wheel, his feet pedaling madly. His mustached mouth was open in a scream of terror or laughter, Clementine couldn't tell which over the noise he was leaving in his wake. Vehicles and pedestrians all scattered before him like frightened quail.
    He bounced across the tracks directly in the path of a trolley. The horses reared in their traces, and the driver's arm pumped hard as he rang the warning bell. The bicycle narrowly avoided slamming into an elegant lady in an osier wood phaeton and struck a street-cleaning wagon instead, sending the wagon up onto the sidewalk with its sprinkler spinning in a wild arc and raining water onto the shoppers in front of Harrison's Dry Goods.
    Miraculously the bicycle was still upright, although wobbling now like a drunken sailor. It hit an awry cobblestone and leaped the curb onto the sidewalk, narrowly missed a whip peddler's stand, clipped the back end of a chestnut cart, and headed for Clementine Kennicutt.
    She told her legs to move, but they wouldn't obey. It never occurred to her to scream, for she had been taught to retain her dignity regardless of the provocation. Instead she simply stood there and watched the giant wheel come straight at her as if someone had aimed and shot it.
    At last the man noticed her in his path and tried to swerve by yanking the wheel crosswise. The ordinary balked at this rough treatment. The tire shrieked as it skidded on the granite sidewalk, and Clementine got a whiff of hot rubber before the wheelman sailed over the handlebars and slammed into her hard, knocking her flat on her back and driving the air from her lungs.
    Her chest strained as she wheezed, and her eyes opened wide onto the candy shop's awning. The green-and-white-striped canvas billowed and blurred.
    "Well, hell." A man's face hovered above her, blocking out the light and the awning. It was a nice face with strong bones and a wide mouth framed by a mustache that was thick and long and the golden brown of maple syrup.
    "Well, hell," he said again. He pushed a big soft gray hat off his forehead, uncovering a hank of sun-tipped light brown hair. He wore a strange, bemused look, like a little boy who's suddenly awakened from a nap and doesn't know where he is. Clementine had the strangest impulse to pat him on the cheek as if she would comfort him. Yet he was the one at fault, sailing cat-in-the-pan over the big front wheel of his ordinary and into her.
    She pushed herself up onto her elbows, and he grabbed her arm. "Take it slow and easy, now," he said. In the next instant he lifted her to her feet with one hand and a hard strength that she felt all the way to the bone.
    "Thank you for assisting me, sir." Her plain black straw hat was tilted askew over one eye, and he helped her to straighten it. She started to thank him for that as well and then lost her thought as she stared into eyes the color of a summer sky and filled with laughter.
    "I'm sorry I stampeded over you like that," he said.
    "What? Oh, no, please... No harm was done."
    His mouth broke into a smile that blazed across his face like the explosion of light from a photographer's flash. "Not to you, maybe. And not to me. But just look at my poor bicycle."
    The big wheel's spokes were bent, and the red India rubber tire lay in the gutter. But she barely gave the ordinary a glance. I must be dreaming this, she thought. Surely she must be dreaming; otherwise how would a cowboy have found his way into Boston, Massachusetts?
    His pants of rough and