"She’ll hardly hold four," said my engineer. I had broken him of the foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.
Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he walked in narrowing circles.
"What’s her speed?" he demanded of the engineer.
"Twenty-five," said that loyal man.
"Easy to run?"
"No; very difficult," was the emphatic answer.
"That just shows that you ain’t fit for your rating. D’you suppose that a man who earns his livin’ by runnin’ 30-knot destroyers for a parstime—for a parstime, mark you!—is going to lie down before any blighted land-crabbing steampinnace on springs?"
Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward into pipes—petrol, steam, and water—with a keen and searching eye.
I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.
"Not—in—the—least," was the answer. "Steam gadgets always take him that way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin’ to show a traction-engine haulin’ gipsy-wagons how to turn corners."
"Tell him everything he wants to know," I said to the engineer, as I dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.
"He don’t want much showing," said the engineer. Now, the two men had not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than three minutes.
