The Motormaniacs | Page 6

The expert was one of the nicest men you ever saw, and we used to take off cylinder heads, and adjust cams, and spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without him. He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you suppose he did? I was lying under the machine at the time, studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle. Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it over for about five minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he had been so patient in explaining things, and never got tired of being asked the same question fifty times. He wiped his eyes with some cotton waste and told me that even if years were to pass and oceans and continents divide us, I had only to say 'come' and he'd come--that is, if I ever got into real trouble with the Manton.
"When it came to saying good-by to him I let him take my cap as a keepsake and accepted a dynamo igniter that he guaranteed not to burn out the wires (though that's exactly what it did a week afterward) and it was all too sad for anything. The governor, you know, that was attached to the igniter, got stuck somehow, and of course the current just sizzled up the plug. Then, when I had been running the machine for about a week and doing splendidly with it, Captain Cartwright turned up from Washington. I suppose I wasn't so pleased as I ought to have been to see him, for though we were engaged and all that, there were wheels within wheels and--you know how silly girls are and what fool things they do, and Gerard Malcolm and the captain, to make matters worse, talked a whole streak about good form, and how in England they always walked their automobites, and how hateful anything like speeding (and going to jail) was to a real English lady, and 'Oh, my dear, would the Queen do it?' Can't you hear him? It goaded me into saying awful things back, and when I took him out for his first spin, as grumpy as only an Englishman can be after you've insulted him from his hat to his boots, I just opened the throttle, threw in the high clutch, and let her go. There were some things I liked about the captain, and the best was that he didn't scare easy. He just folded his arms and never wiggled an eyelash while I took some of the grades like the Empire State Express.
"I knew he was boiling inside, in spite of his calm, British, new-washed look, for I hadn't let him kiss me or anything, and nobody, however brave he is, welcomes the idea of being squashed under a ton of old iron. You see I was in a perfectly vicious humor, thinking what an awful mistake I had made, and what a little fool I had been, and how if it had only been Gerard Malcolm--and while my hands were clenched on the steering-wheel I could see the mark of his horrid ring' sticking through my gauntlets, and I wouldn't have cared two straws if I had blown up a tire just then, and driven head-foremost through a stone wall.
"I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when the right-hand cylinder began to miss a little. Then, after a while, the left started to skip, too. I stopped under a tree to look for the trouble and pulled up the bonnet. The spark-plugs were badly carbonized, and when I had seen to them and had put the captain on the crank, we could only get explosions at intervals. There was good compression; everything was lubricating nicely; no heating or sticking anywhere--but the engine had lain down on us. The captain was so angry he wouldn't speak a word to me, and mumbled red-hot things to himself under his breath. Guess how I felt. But he was too much of a gentleman not to crank--and so he cranked and cranked and still nothing happened. I chased a whole row of things one after another--battery, buzzer, oil or gasoline in the cylinders, defective insulation, commutator, water in the carburettor, choked feed-pipe,--and all it did was to cough in a dreary, tow-me-home-to-mother sort of way,
"If the captain had known anything about engines and could have made it start, I expect I would have married him and lived happy ever afterward. It was just his Heaven-sent chance to win out and show