Traffics and Discoveries

"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.

"I don't want to go anywhere. I'm thinkin' of you who've got to live with her. She'll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"

"She will."

"I've never scorched yet, and I not beginnin' now." He shut off steam firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an' shove her along by hand."

"Where to?"

"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."

"She ought to have drag-ropes – little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.

We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half-a-mile till we came to a cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.

"All out haymakin', o' course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the parlour for an instant. "What's the evolution now?"

"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.

"Hmm! But they wouldn't 'ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to say… I thought so! Where's a stick?"

A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.

Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying- square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.

At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and sat down to scratch.

"That's his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in, push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag is tempted beyond 'is strength."

We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1,200 lb., and even on ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we heard a gross rustic laugh.

"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer 'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft.

A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.

"Some happy craft with a well-found engine-room! How different!" panted Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.

It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good cars will at sight of trouble.

"Water, only water," I answered in reply to offers of help.

"There's a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They'll give you all you want. Say I sent you. Gregory – Michael Gregory. Good-bye!"

"Ought to 'ave been in the Service. Prob'ly is," was Pyecroft's comment.

At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.

"No objection to your going through it," said the lodge-keeper. "It'll save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick."

But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.

"We've come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far," said Hinchcliffe (he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), "and now we have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet."

At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road, held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.

"Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers in my sinful time!" wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle. "What's worryin' Ada now?"

"The forward eccentric-strap screw's dropped off," said the engineer, investigating.

"That all? I thought it was a propeller-blade."

"We must go an' look for it. There isn't another."

"Not me," said Pyecroft from his seat. "Out pinnace, Hinch, an' creep for it. It won't be more than five miles back."

The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.

"Look like etymologists, don't they? Does she decant her innards often, so to speak?" Pyecroft asked.

I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly touched.

"Poor Hinch! Poor – poor Hinch!" he said. "And that's only one of her little games, is it? He'll be homesick for the Navy by night."

When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer looked on admiringly.

"Your boiler's only seated on four little paperclips," he said, crawling from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?"

I told him.

"And yet you were afraid to come into the Nightmare's engine-room when we were runnin' trials!"

"It's all a matter of taste," Pyecroft volunteered. "But I will say for you, Hinch, you've certainly got the hang of her steamin' gadgets in quick time."

He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a tremor in his arm.

"She don't seem so answer her helm somehow," he said.

"There's a lot of play to the steering-gear," said my engineer. "We generally tighten it up every few miles."

"'Like me to stop now? We've run as much as one mile and a half without incident," he replied tartly.

"Then you're lucky," said my engineer, bristling in turn.

"They'll wreck the whole turret out o' nasty professional spite in a minute," said Pyecroft. "That's the worst o' machinery. Man dead ahead, Hinch – semaphorin' like the flagship in a fit!"

"Amen!" said Hinchcliffe. "Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?"

He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in his hands.