“I know,” was Gale’s slow reply. “It breaks my heart. It’s the biggest thing we’ll ever know, and we’re stepping out of it. But you can’t desert a pal.”
“Who wants to?” Jan demanded. “Somebody had to make this trip. That Jimmie of yours was right up here fighting before his country was in the war at all. Somebody had to go. They couldn’t spare fighting men—not just now they couldn’t. So they sent us. It’s always a woman’s job to fill in when there’s not enough men to go ’round.”
“I know,” Gale agreed. “It’s good of you to step into it all the same.”
They came at last to the spot where they must leave the Colonel’s fine road and turn up a camel trail.
“Jeepers!” Jan exclaimed, as her jeep took a steep ridge between trees so close together that they brushed them. “This is going to be something!” And it was.
At times the sturdy little jeep, working on all four wheels, stood straight up on end and pawed the air like a bucking bronco, then leapt forward into space to land on all fours and plunge forward again.
“It’s a good thing I was raised on a ranch!” Jan exclaimed once. “If I hadn’t been I’d never be able to wrangle this.”
The time came at last when it seemed they could go no farther and they were still a good twenty miles from the spot on the map at which the English captain had said, “Here you must leave your jeep.”
“He’s not been up this trail lately,” was Jan’s sad comment. The winter rains had washed the trail away leaving a perpendicular bank of earth up which no jeep, however stout, could hope to travel.
“Let’s get out and think,” was Gale’s suggestion.