The Motor Scout: A Story of Adventure in South America

by Herbert Strang

When the petrol arrived, he filled two flasks and slung them on his saddle-bow. The messengers reported that all was quiet at the house. It appeared to be locked up and uninhabited. Tim suspected that Pardo had been among the men who had fled from the town, and had very likely gone to San Juan to stir up the Prefect. The loss of the hacienda would be a stinging blow to him. Tim wondered what had become of old Biddy and the other servants, and made up his mind to take the first opportunity of finding out.

He set off, rode along his chain of vedettes, and halting at the man nearest the cave on the San Rosario side, dismounted and proceeded on foot. In a few minutes he returned on the cycle, much to the surprise of the vedette. Colonel Zegarra smiled paternally when he rode into the camp, and made a laughing allusion to the gobernador's ludicrous appearance on that historic occasion a few days before. To Tim it seemed to have happened weeks ago.

The little force was not provided with tents. Men and officers slept on saddle cloths, spread in glades among the trees. The situation was far from pleasant. The low ground was infested with mosquitoes and other insects, whose pertinacious attentions kept awake many more than those who were on sentry duty.

During the night Tim resolved to make a circular reconnaissance next morning, if there was no warning of the enemy's advance. On his cycle he could cover the ground much more rapidly than on horseback, and, with the zeal of a novice, he was eager to examine the paths minutely from a strategical point of view. He would go by the western and return by the eastern path, trusting to the speed of his machine if he came in touch with the enemy and were pursued.

Colonel Zegarra raised no objection when Tim diplomatically suggested the importance of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the ground. The nominal commander was in fact a figure-head, conscious of his own ignorance, and quite content to leave everything to his chief of staff, and to reap the credit of the successes which he hoped that energetic young man would gain.

Tim rode off immediately after breakfast. On the way he passed the vedettes strung out at intervals of about three miles, and leaving the last vedette behind, near the cave, sped on beside the river. The only serious risk he had to guard against until he reached the cross-track leading to the eastern path was the possibility of meeting a party of the enemy approaching from round a bend. In such a case he might have scant time to turn his machine; indeed, in many places he would have to dismount to do so, owing to the narrowness of the track. If this occurred on a rising gradient, he might be overtaken before he could get away. But he had all his wits about him, and reflected that after all the enemy, if they moved, would probably follow the more direct road past Durand's house.

He arrived at the spot where his father's party had halted while Romaña scouted along the cross-track. Turning to the right, he rode for some little distance along this track, then suddenly made up his mind to return to the river, approach a little nearer to the camp, and leaving the machine well hidden, climb up to the ridge and try to see what the enemy were doing. From the top there was an uninterrupted view for many miles. The climb proved an even stiffer business than he expected, and on gaining the summit, hot, out of breath, and with trembling legs, he was disgusted to find that the Inca camp was too distant for him to distinguish anything very clearly without the aid of field-glasses. He saw figures moving about in the enclosure, but there was no sign, on the track or in the camp itself, of any general movement. It was quite possible that the events of the past two days were still unknown there. The fugitives from the town would naturally have turned towards San Juan, which was nearer than the Inca camp, and much more easily accessible. But the lack of communication between the camp and San Rosario struck Tim, raw hand though he was, as evidence of astonishing neglect of ordinary military precautions.

Returning to his machine, Tim rode along the cross-track, reversing the direction of his night escape, which already seemed ancient history. He was careful to profit by the screen of trees on his left hand, and so keep out of sight from the spot where Mollendo's scouts had been posted; and he approached the fork warily. There was no one in sight, either up or down the eastern track. He wheeled to the right, and rode on towards his own camp at the cross-roads.

Only once before had he travelled this part of the track on his cycle--when he returned home after being ransomed. He remembered how difficult he had found it, both when riding down, and when marching up with his captors. It was uneven, tortuous, and with many gradients. Its general tendency was downhill, but here and there it rose so steeply that, in spite of the power of his engine, he had to alight and push the machine. At similar descents he had some trouble in holding it in with his brakes, and where the track twisted and ran downhill at the same time, for safety's sake he dismounted again, and found that wheeling down was even more difficult than pushing up. But the worst was over when he arrived within about three miles of Durand's house. From this point the track ran almost uninterruptedly downhill, and was fairly smooth, and he sped along gaily at the rate of sixty miles an hour.

A downward run of about a mile brought him to the wooden footbridge spanning a deep fissure that cut across the track. For two hundred yards above the bridge the machine was quite beyond control; even a slight rise in the last fifty yards failed to check his speed appreciably. He dashed on to the rough timbers at a force that made him tremble for the framework of the cycle, and not until he was fifty yards up the gentle gradient on the farther side was he able to reduce his speed to a reasonable rate.