"WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO—"
Swiftly along the sun-flecked road sped the dispatch-rider. In the mellow freshness of the new day he rode, and the whir of his machine in its lightning flight mingled with the cheery songs of the birds, whose early morning chorus heartened and encouraged him. There was a balm in the fragrant atmosphere of the cool, gray morning which entered the soul of Tom Slade and whispered to him, There is no such word as fail.
Out of the night he had come, out of travail, and brain-racking perplexity and torturing effort, crossing rushing waters and matching his splendid strength and towering will against obstacles, against fate, against everything.
As he held the handle-bar of Uncle Sam in that continuous handshake which they knew so well, his right arm felt numb and sore, and his whole body ached. Uncle Sam's big, leering glass eye was smashed, his mud-guard wrenched off, and dried mud was upon his wheels. His rider's uniform was torn and water-soaked, his face black with grime. They made a good pair.
Never a glance to right or left did the rider give, nor so much as a perfunctory nod to the few early risers who paused to stare at him as he sped by. In the little hamlet of Persan an old Frenchman sitting on a rustic seat before the village inn, removed his pipe from his mouth long enough to call,
"La côte?"
But never a word did the rider answer. Children, who, following the good example of the early bird, were already abroad, scurried out of his way, making a great clatter in their wooden shoes, and gaping until he passed beyond their sight.
Over the bridge at Soignois he rushed, making its ramshackle planks rattle and throw up a cloud of dust from between the vibrating seams. Out of this cloud he emerged like a gray spectre, body bent, head low, gaze fixed and intense, leaving a pandemonium of dust and subsiding echoes behind him.
At Virneu an old housewife threw open her blinds and seeing the dusty khaki of the rider, summoned her brood, who waved the tricolor from the casement, laughing and calling, "Vive l'Amerique!"
Their cheery voices and fraternal patriotism did cause Tom to turn his head and call,
"Merci. Vive la France!"
And they answered again with a torrent of French.
The morning was well established as he passed through Chuisson, and a clock upon a romantic, medieval-looking little tower told him that it lacked but ten minutes of five o'clock.
A feeling of doubt, almost of despair, seized upon him and he called in that impatient surliness which springs from tense anxiety, asking an old man how far it was to Dieppe.
The man shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in polite confession that he did not understand English.
In his anxiety it irritated Tom. "What do you know?" he muttered.
Out of Chuisson he labored up a long hill, and though Uncle Sam made no more concession to it than to slacken his unprecedented rate of speed the merest trifle, the difference communicated itself to Tom at once and it seemed, by contrast, as if they were creeping. On and up Uncle Sam went, plying his way sturdily, making a great noise and a terrific odor—dogged, determined and irresistible.
But the rider stirred impatiently. Would they ever, ever, reach the top? And when they should, there would be another hamlet in a valley, another bridge, more stupid people who could not speak English, more villages, more bends in the road, still other villages, and then—another hill.
It seemed to Tom that he had been travelling for ten years and that there was to be no end of it. Ride, ride, ride—it brought him nowhere. His right arm which had borne that tremendous strain, was throbbing so that he let go the handle-bar from time to time in the hope of relief. It was the pain of acute tiredness, for which there could be no relief but rest. Just to throw himself down and rest! Oh, if he could only lay that weary, aching arm across some soft pillow and leave it there—just leave it there. Let it hang, bend it, hold it above him, lay it on Uncle Sam's staunch, unfeeling arm of steel, he could not, could not, get it rested.
The palm of his hand tingled with a kind of irritating feeling like chilblains, and he must be continually removing one or other hand from the bar so that he could reach one with the other. It did not help him keep his poise. If he could only scratch his right hand once and be done with it! But it annoyed him like a fly.
Up, up, up, they went, and passed a quaint, old, thatch-roofed house. Crazy place to build a house! And the people in it—probably all they could do was to shrug their shoulders in that stupid way when asked a question in English.
He was losing his morale—was this dispatch-rider.
But near the top of the hill he regained it somewhat. Perhaps he could make up for this lost time in some straight, level reach of road beyond.
Up, up, up, plowed Uncle Sam, one lonely splinter of shingle still bound within his spokes, and his poor, dented headlight bereft of its dignity.
"I've an idea the road turns north about a mile down," Tom said to himself, "and runs around through——"
The words stopped upon his lips as Uncle Sam, still laboring upward, reached level ground, and as if to answer Tom out of his own uncomplaining and stouter courage, showed him a sight which sent his faltering hope skyward and started his heart bounding.
For there below them lay the vast and endless background of the sea, throwing every intervening detail of the landscape into insignificance. There it was, steel blue in the brightening sunlight and glimmering here and there in changing white, where perhaps some treacherous rock or bar lay just submerged. And upon it, looking infinitesimal in the limitless expanse, was something solid with a column of black smoke rising and winding away from it and dissolving in the clear, morning air.
"There you are!" said Tom, patting Uncle Sam patronizingly in a swift change of mood. "See there? That's the Atlantic Ocean—that is. Now will you hurry? That's a ship coming in—see? I bet it's a whopper, too. Do you know what—what's off beyond there?" he fairly panted in his excitement; "do you? You old French hobo, you? America! That's where I came from. Now will you hurry? That's Dieppe, where the white[2] is and those steeples, see? And way across there on the other side is America!"
For Uncle Sam, notwithstanding his name, was a French motorcycle and had never seen America.
[ [2] Dieppe's famous beach.