"Good!" cried Tommy. "You buck up and finish your lunch, while we go round to the garage and get the car."
The car, when it arrived, proved to be a 12-14 De Dion which had apparently been a stranger to the sunny land of France for many strenuous years. In colour it had once been green.
"Not much to look at," said Tommy apologetically; "but she goes—eh, Mortimer?"
"She would if I had her," admitted Mortimer, "for what she'd fetch."
Knowing, however, of Tommy's amazing genius for coaxing motion out of discarded scrap-iron, I got in behind without a qualm. With a fanfare on the horn, we slid out of the garage, and then, clanking like an ironmonger's shop in an earthquake, pounded bravely up Park Street at a surprising velocity.
It only took me about five minutes to cast my week-end trappings into a Gladstone bag and square accounts with the worthy lady at whose house I had been staying. Then off we thundered again through the peaceful respectabilities of Clifton and Redland, out on to the far-flung road that wanders northwards up the Severn Valley.
If the Zeitgeist had any particular purpose when it tossed Tommy's atoms together, it must have been the production of a super-chauffeur. Amazingly erratic as he is in other things, his driving and handling of a car more nearly approaches perfection than any human effort I know. In other hands the hired wreckage that bore our fortunes would, I feel sure, have collapsed hopelessly long before we reached Gloucester. But Tommy, who, according to Mortimer, had pored lovingly over it with a spanner for several hours that morning, lifted it triumphantly, if complainingly, through all demands. At half-past six, dusty and incredibly vociferous, it clattered into Ross, and, practically speaking, our journey was accomplished.
We had a cup of tea at the hotel there, and then in the cool of the evening clanked on cheerfully through the thickly wooded lanes that led to Sir Cuthbert Quinn's bungalow. The distance must have been about six miles, and it was while we were covering this that we got on to the question of how great a strain a salmon rod would stand. Tommy had been telling us some yarn about how a man he knew had jerked a fifteen-pound salmon clean out of the water, and I had ventured to cast a little mild doubt on the accuracy of the tale. Tommy had been quite indignant.
"Why, of course it's possible," he had declared. "A salmon rod will stand almost any strain. The best swimmer in the world would be quite helpless if you hooked him by a belt round his middle."
"Get out, Tommy," I said derisively; "he'd break you every time."