“It’s all a matter of taste,” Pyecroft volunteered. “But I will say for you, Hinch, you’ve certainly got the hang of her steamin’ gadgets in quick time.”
He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a tremor in his arm.
“She don’t seem so answer her helm somehow,” he said.
“There’s a lot of play to the steering-gear,” said my engineer. “We generally tighten it up every few miles.”
“‘Like me to stop now? We’ve run as much as one mile and a half without incident,” he replied tartly.
“Then you’re lucky,” said my engineer, bristling in turn.
“They’ll wreck the whole turret out o’ nasty professional spite in a minute,” said Pyecroft. “That’s the worst o’ machinery. Man dead ahead, Hinch—semaphorin’ like the flagship in a fit!”
“Amen!” said Hinchcliffe. “Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?”
He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in his hands.
“Twenty-three and a half miles an hour,” he began, weighing a small beam-engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. “From the top of the hill over our measured quarter-mile—twenty-three and a half.”