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.