Being a cautious man, experienced in the ways of motor-cars, he refused, even when pressed, to give any exact estimate of the distance which the patched Pallas Athene might run. The only thing he regarded as certain was that she would break down completely in the end.
"It might be two miles out of the town," he said, "or it might be a hundred."
"Do the best you can with her while I'm getting a cup of tea," said Jimmy. "Then fill up her tank and give her a pint of oil. I'll risk it."
The behaviour of the Pallas Athene after leaving Taunton was excellent. It may have been that the hour's rest in the garage revived her. More probably she was pleased by the attention she received from the mechanic. All women, even dignified Greek goddesses, like being fussed over and petted. Jimmy was moderate in his demands for speed and did not demand anything more than what he called "a funeral trot" of thirty-five miles an hour. Exeter was passed successfully, and the time came when the main road must be left for the last stage of the journey.
Jimmy, gaining confidence, ran at a fair speed up and down some abrupt hills on roads marked on the maps in inferior colours, occasionally not coloured at all. On a lonely open stretch of one of what the map makers describe as "other metalled roads, narrow," the breakdown, prophesied by the Taunton mechanic, came. Without so much as a warning shriek or a death rattle the Pallas Athene gasped and stopped.
Jimmy did all that a man could do. He lay on his back and screwed nuts. He lay on his side and screwed other nuts. He crawled on his stomach. He knelt, stooped, crouched, tapped and hammered. Like the good Samaritan, he poured in oil and would have poured in wine too if he had had any. Beth and Mary encouraged him and tried to help him. They spread a whole kit of tools out on a bank on the side of the road and very soon learned to distinguish between a double-ended spanner, a box spanner and an adjustable spanner, often handed the right weapon to Jimmy without giving him a wrong one more than a couple of times first.
"Well I'm damned if I know what's wrong," said Jimmy, after an hour's experimental effort. "If only the wretched thing had held out another quarter of an hour we'd have been there, we can't be more than seven or eight miles from Morriton St. James, and Uncle Evie's house is just outside."
"Couldn't Mary and I walk on," said Beth, "and send somebody back for you? There must be a car in the village?"
"Morriton St. James is a town, not a village," said Jimmy, "and there are lots of cars, but it would take you the best part of three hours to get there—if you ever got there at all. Look at Mary's shoes, and your own are no better."
Mary exhibited, for admiration or contempt, a delicate suède shoe, certainly not intended for long walks over rough roads.