That he did this thing, Archer assures me. The rain was at last holding up and the gale subsiding into a brisk, steady wind out of the west, and they sat, these two, in the two seats of the plane, and chatted about old times, there in that desolate submerged meadow. And here is something that will please you.
“He was talking about Bridgeboro, wherre he used to live,” said Archer, “and a fellerr he knew therre that got him into the Boy Scouts a long time ago. Roy Blakeley was that fellerr’s name.” So you see that far away in the devastated, scourged land of France, your name was given to the same wind which was to bear these two adventurers to their destination. And so, chatting, they waited in the lonely darkness.
“The job will be getting her started,” Slade said.
“How about landing?” Archer asked him.
“It’ll be easier now I’ve got somebody with me. Got your dispatch book?”
Of course Archer had.
“Then go and get a spoke out of your wheel or maybe the timer-bar would be better. Get two or three spokes. You’ve got your clippers all right, haven’t you? Go ahead. I’ll tell you when you get back. Get some wire off your mudguard, too.”
“There was only one way to do with Slady,” Archer observes. “You had to do just what he said.”
So he waded through the soggy field to where his motorcycle, half sunken in the mud which had been a road, stood “pokin’ upwarrd,” as he said, “like an old balky horrse.” Its carbureter and gas tank must have been filled with mud by now and there was no hope of getting a kick out of it even if he could have extricated it. With his nippers he clipped off several spokes and removed also the long nickel rod by which the timer was controlled at the handle bar. This was about three feet long. He took also the wire and his nippers.
Scarcely had he returned when they were both struck silent by the thin, spent sound of a locomotive whistle far in the distance.