Around the World in 100 Days

by Gary Blackwood

  Johnny gave her a hurt look. “She’s plenty fast.”

  “He’s right,” said Harry. “We can beat that battery-powered perambulator without even trying.” Johnny nodded in agreement.

  Elizabeth raised one delicate eyebrow dubiously. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Then watch closely.” Harry turned back to Morrison. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a race.”

  SIXTEEN In which

  THE ADAGE “THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT” IS PROVEN TRUE

  While Morrison went off to his bank to withdraw money for the wager, Johnny took Harry aside. “We will win, won’t we?”

  Harry patted his shoulder reassuringly. “We can’t possibly lose, lad.”

  They packed the differential with fresh grease and installed a new leather gasket. As they were cleaning up, Charles finally appeared on the scene. “Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion?”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “but we won’t be leaving for a while yet. We’re going to race the Flash against an electric car. You’re just in time to place your bet.”

  “I am not in the habit of throwing away money on bets.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Harry. “You might want to reconsider. This is a sure thing.”

  “There are no sure things. I suppose you’ve made a wager of some sort.”

  Harry nodded. “A thousand dollars.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Charles. “See here, Fogg, do you really think you can afford to waste time racing other motorcars? You have a more important contest to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried. We’ve plenty of time. Besides, I undertook this whole trip in order to show what the Flash can do. This is just another way of demonstrating that.”

  Morrison led them to a level, well-maintained stretch of road bordered by hay fields, just west of town. “Would you consider a mile a fair distance?” he asked Harry.

  “One mile or a hundred, it makes no difference.”

  “You see the barn with the silo? Let’s call the silo our finish line, shall we?”

  “I suppose we three should get out,” said Elizabeth. “You’ll want the car as light as possible.”

  “There’s no need,” said Harry. “She can easily carry twice your weight.”

  Charles started to climb out of the car. “I agree with Elizabeth. The lighter the better.”

  “I’m staying,” said Johnny.

  Elizabeth, her eyes sparkling with anticipation, tied the string of her hat tightly under her chin. “So am I.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case.” Charles took his seat again.

  “Can you handle a pistol?” Harry asked.

  “Of course. Why?”

  “There’s one under the seat. You may be the starter. All right with you, Mr. Morrison?”

  “Aye.”

  When the road was clear of wagons and carriages, the motorcars lined up side by side. Harry engaged the gears and released the hand brake. “Ready ...” said Charles. “Steady ...” The instant the pistol went off, Harry yanked out the throttle. The Flash leaped forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit.

  “Where’s Morrison?” he demanded, not wanting to take his eyes off the road.

  “Almost even with us!” called Elizabeth. “And he’s gaining!”

  “I’ll be bound! I never dreamed he’d be that fast!” Harry pulled the throttle out almost to its limit and the Flash surged ahead. “Where is he now?”

  “He can’t keep up!” said Elizabeth gleefully, holding on to her hat. “He’s dropping back!”

  Harry gave a triumphant laugh. He couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder at his opponent. Just as he did, Elizabeth gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh!” she cried. “Look out!”

  Harry jerked his head around to see two large dogs, one chasing the other, come loping out of the hay field and directly into his path. “Hang it!” He wrenched the wheel to the left. The car bounded into the ditch and out again, nearly flinging its passengers from their seats; it mowed down a sizable swath of hay before Harry managed to stop.

  Morrison was so far behind that the dogs presented no danger to him; totally oblivious of the trouble they had caused, they disappeared into the field across the road. As he sped past the sidelined Flash, the Scotsman laid on his electric horn; it gave an irritating, insulting bleat.

  “Well,” said Charles. “So much for your sure thing.”

  Elizabeth swatted him with her hat. “Oh, do stop gloating. I think it was admirable of you, Harry, to care more about the dogs’ lives than about winning the race.”

  “Yes, well, they’re quite valuable dogs,” said Harry.

  “Really?” said Charles. “They looked rather like mangy mongrels to me.”

  “Perhaps. But each of those mangy mongrels is now worth five hundred dollars.”

  When Harry had paid up, his money belt felt alarmingly thin. As they headed west again, he said to Elizabeth, “I suppose you’ll recount all this in your next dispatch.”

  “Of course. Why? Are you afraid of looking foolish?”

  “Not at all. I just want your readers to know that the Flash would have won, except for the dogs.”

  “Apparently the papers here aren’t following our progress,” said Charles. “No one I spoke to had heard anything about us.”

  “It’s just as well,” Harry said. “America may have its equivalent of the Luddites. I wouldn’t want to run into them again.”

  “Luddites?” said Elizabeth.

  Charles nodded grimly. “Didn’t you hear about our narrow escape back in London?” He pointed at the cracked windscreen. “That’s a souvenir of it.”

  “I should fix that,” muttered Johnny.

  “So,” said Harry. “What did you think of Morrison’s electric vehicle?”

  “It’s very clever, I suppose,” put in Elizabeth. “But I don’t think it would make it round the world.”

  “It might,” said Johnny, almost to himself. “With some way of charging the batteries.”

  Harry laughed. “We’ll work on that when we get home.”

  “If you get home,” said Charles. “I’ll be interested to see how you manage to cross the Pacific Ocean, Asia, and Europe with what meager money you have left. I trust you don’t expect any help from me. I’m only an observer, remember.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Harry said calmly. Somehow he could not bring himself to worry about such mundane matters. For now, the car was running well and the path before them was straight and smooth. What more could a person ask?

  The road was, in fact, so decent that Charles managed to make a fairly legible entry in his journal.

  Saturday, August 22

  I wonder if Fogg has any notion how much he sounds like Dickens’s hapless Mr. Micawber: “Something will turn up.” Though I suppose it is in my best interests—or at least my father’s best interests—to see this venture fail, I have no desire to be stranded somewhere in the American wilderness.

  We paused in Omaha, the eastern terminus of the Union & Central Pacific Railroad, barely long enough to eat, buy fuel, and take on water from a horse trough. I did manage to secure both a detailed map of the railroad’s route and a train timetable. In the rear of the timetable I discovered an even more useful sort of schedule—one that lists the departure times and destinations for all the major steamship lines that dock in San Francisco.

  Fogg has apparently made no arrangments for getting us across the Pacific. He does at least have a destination in mind—Hong Kong—but only because my father suggested it. Consulting the steamship schedule, I see that the next steamer for Hong Kong sails on September 5th at 2 p.m.—a mere fourteen days from now. Thirteen days and twenty hours, to be precise. And San Francisco is still some 2,000 miles away, which means that we must cover roughly 143 miles each day.

  Fogg considers that, in his words, “a walk in the park.” Both Shaugnessey and Elizabeth seem to share his unconcern. Why am I the only one
aboard with any sense?

  We are scarcely an hour out of Omaha, but already there are no houses in sight, nor any trees, only empty prairie. The only sign that anyone has ever passed this way before is the braidlike pattern of interlaced ruts that has been accumulating for half a century, since the first covered wagons crossed the plains to California and Oregon.

  The giddy sense of freedom that had come over Harry on their first day in America returned like a gust of wind; the dull ache that had settled in his arms and back from the long hours of driving seemed to melt away. Back in London, he had seen this country in the same way he saw the Atlantic Ocean—as something to be crossed as quickly as possible. Now he found himself almost wishing that he had no deadline hanging over him, that he could simply go on driving across this uncluttered landscape with no concern at all for actually getting anywhere.

  It was a feeling that he had experienced before, on the cricket field and rugby pitch. As much as he loved the taste of victory, acheiving it meant an end to the game. There were times when he would have liked to go on playing endlessly, for the sheer enjoyment of it.

  By the same token, winning this wager would mean that the journey would end, that he would return to his life in London. It was not a bad life, by any means. But even he, with his talent for living in the moment, knew that the aimless, irresponsible existence he was accustomed to could not go on indefinitely, any more than the seemingly boundless prairie could.

  Harry felt his sense of elation fade and the ache in his arms return. He shook the sober thoughts from his head and struck up a determinedly cheery chorus of “There’s a Good Time Coming.”

  Near dusk they spied a windmill in the distance, spinning furiously in the rising wind, pumping water for some remote ranch. “There’s what Morrison needs!” said Harry. “He could erect one on the back of his car and run a dynamo with it.”

  “He’d generate plenty of power today.” Elizabeth clutched at her hat, which threatened to take flight. “It’s a pity you didn’t equip the Flash with a sail.” She leaned forward so the breeze wouldn’t whip her words away. “Didn’t your father travel in a wind-driven vehicle at some point? Sorry, I forgot. You don’t like talking about his exploits.”

  Harry sighed. “It seems there’s no escaping it. As he described the thing, it was a sort of sledge with sails.” He surveyed the boundless expanse of grass, undulating like waves in the wind. “As a matter of fact, it would have been on this very stretch of the prairie.” Harry was silent for a time. Though he seldom gave a thought to the future, he couldn’t help wondering whether his own children—assuming he had any—would be asked continually about the epic journey of the Flash, and whether they would resent it.

  “I’m afraid a sail wouldn’t do us much good, in any case,” he said. “The wind’s blowing in the wrong direction.”

  SEVENTEEN In which

  DISASTER LOOMS ON THE HORIZON

  Two days out of Omaha, there was still no end to the prairie in sight. Harry’s wish to go on driving across it forever had given way to a festering impatience. He felt as though they were stuck in a stage play, with the same bit of scenery being cranked past in the background, over and over. He found himself almost wishing for some sort of trouble, just to break the monotony.

  Ever since Des Moines, Johnny had had the vague feeling that something was not right with the Flash. But the engine kept chuffing along tirelessly and the big wheels rolled without hindrance over the sandy soil and across the few shallow streams they encountered.

  At Lexington, a hardware dealer sold them ten gallons of expensive kerosene from a rusty-looking drum. Later that day there was a flurry of excitement when they overtook a prairie schooner; though caravans of these wagons had once stretched from horizon to horizon, now it seemed like a quaint relic of an earlier age. On the flapping canvas cover was painted the motto THE PAXTONS, ILLINOIS TO OREGON. The driver stared at them in awe, like someone who has caught a glimpse of the future.

  “Well, finally,” said Elizabeth, “something mildly interesting for my next dispatch. If this keeps up, my editor may decide my stories are too tedious to print.”

  “Why don’t you invent something?” suggested Harry. “You could have us meet up with Buffalo Bill, or perhaps the Dalton Gang.”

  “I am a reporter, not a novelist. It’s rather a shame, really, that the Indians have all packed it in. An Indian attack would be just the thing to capture my readers.”

  “Provided you weren’t captured first,” said Charles. He laughed, then—an event so rare that Harry turned to see whether something was wrong. “I was just thinking about a story I read when I was perhaps nine or ten,” said Charles. “I can’t recall the title, but I remember it was absolutely rife with Indian attacks. Curiously enough, it also featured a steam-driven vehicle. What was it called? Something about a hunter ...”

  “The Huge Hunter; or, the Steam Man of the Prairies,” said Harry.

  “That’s it! You’ve read it, then?”

  Harry grinned. “Only about fifty times. I wouldn’t have thought it was your sort of book.”

  “Oh, it was ripping!” Charles turned to Elizabeth. “The hero is a fifteen-year-old dwarf who also happens to be a genius. He invents a huge mechanical man powered by steam and capable of pulling a wagon and he drives the contraption all over the West, fighting off Indians at every turn.”

  “It sounds fascinating,” said Elizabeth.

  Harry and Charles failed to notice the sarcasm in her voice. They proceeded to recall all their favorite scenes from The Huge Hunter. Even Johnny put in a few words; though he had never learned his letters, Harry had told him about the boy genius—also named Johnny—and his Steam Man so often that it seemed he had read the book himself.

  Elizabeth let them go on for half an hour before her patience ran out. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! If you’re going to discuss books, at least talk about something with a shred of literary value!”

  Harry gave her a wounded look. “It may not be great literature, but that book made a profound impression on me.”

  Elizabeth’s disapproval had put a damper on Charles’s enthusiasm. “No, she’s right, Fogg. We were mere boys when we read that. Now that we’ve studied the classics, I daresay it would seem like pretty poor stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Harry. “I didn’t manage to make it through many of the classics.”

  Charles laughed rather disdainfully. “Of course not. You were too busy playing rugby and cricket.”

  “How do you—?” Harry turned to glance at him. “Oh. You were at Eton, were you?”

  “I didn’t suppose you would remember me. I was a year ahead of you, and we didn’t move in the same circles. Besides, as I recall, you weren’t there for long.”

  Their feeling of camaraderie had faded. They fell silent. Elizabeth seemed unaware of the tension and of her role in creating it. She seemed, in fact, quite cheerful, pointing out the few sights that appeared on the mostly featureless plain—a patch of wildflowers, a prairie dog village, a herd of pronghorn antelope, the gloomy clouds gathering on the horizon.

  “It looks as though we may be in for another typhoon,” she said.

  Charles unfolded his latest map purchase. “Perhaps we can make it to North Platte before it hits.”

  “How far is it?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Twenty or thirty miles.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid I can’t wait that long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gave him an uncomfortable look. “You know.”

  “Oh!” Charles blushed deeply. “Oh, I see.” He tapped Harry on the shoulder. “Fogg, I must ask you to stop.”

  Though Harry had overheard their exchange, he saw no harm in making Charles squirm. “Stop? Whatever for?”

  “For . . . for personal reasons.”

  “Don’t tell me; you’ve lost your map.”

  Elizabeth spoiled the fun by saying brusquely, “If you must know, I require a bit of
privacy. I won’t be long, I assure you.”

  They stopped next to a small rise—what passed for a hill in these parts—and Elizabeth disappeared over it. “We’re running low on fuel, anyway,” said Harry. “We may as well fill up the tank.”

  “Maybe we should strain it,” suggested Johnny.

  “I don’t see the point. Every other batch we bought has been clean enough. You worry too much, lad.”

  Though Johnny had lit up his pipe, he wasn’t smoking it; he sat rubbing his forehead with one large hand. “Are you all right?” asked Harry. “Do you want another dose of Dr. Pemberton’s Syrup?”

  Johnny shook his head. “I still feel something wrong.”

  “We checked everything on the car that can be checked. Maybe it’s the weather that’s bothering you.”

  Elizabeth scrambled over the rise, holding her long skirt aloft to clear the tall prairie grass. “Look over there!” She pointed to the southwest. Beneath the dark gray storm clouds was a lighter band the color of smoke. “I think the grass is burning!”

  Harry gave a low whistle. “Hang me! Into the car, everyone! Now!” He upended the kerosene can, then tossed it into the back of the car and sprang into the driver’s seat. “The fire is still a good way off,” he said, as they gained speed. “I’m sure we can outrun it.”

  “If nothing goes wrong with the car,” Elizabeth added.

  “Nothing will. She’s running fine.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Harry glanced over his shoulder. She gave him a quick smile that seemed cheerful and confident, but it was undermined by the look of anxiety—alarm, almost—in her blue eyes. It was not like her, Harry thought, to be daunted by danger. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make it.”

  “I’m not worried,” she replied, so carelessly that he almost believed her.

  At first they seemed to be heading out of harm’s way. But the wind picked up, urging the flames into a faster pace. And then, so gradually that Harry scarcely realized it, the Flash began to lose power. Harry pulled out the throttle as far as it would go, but the car didn’t respond.