Around the World in 100 Days

by Gary Blackwood

  “Not here. I unhooked it.”

  “We’ll have to vent the steam, then, which means we’ll run out of water pretty quickly.”

  “How quickly?” asked Elizabeth.

  “The water tank holds thirty gallons. That might get us forty or fifty miles.” Harry sighed. “I suppose we’d better wait until morning. It’s nearly dark.”

  While Johnny set up the tents, Elizabeth prepared a stew from bully beef and dried vegetables. All Harry could manage was to sit on the running board of the Flash and watch. “The fire feels good,” said Elizabeth. Harry didn’t reply. “You’re angry with me, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are, and I don’t blame you. I shouldn’t have insisted on driving. It’s just that . . . well, frankly, I resented the implication that only men can drive motorcars. I wanted to show you—and myself, I suppose—that it wasn’t so.”

  Harry laughed weakly. “It seems we all have something to prove, on this trip.”

  Elizabeth held her hands up to the fire. The heat made her fingers, which hadn’t healed yet, throb painfully. She thought about how gently Harry had bandaged the burn for her. She would never have guessed that he was capable of doing anything so carefully. “What you said before, about there being more at stake than just the money. What did you mean?” Harry didn’t answer. “I know you want prove what motorcars can do. Is that what you meant?”

  “Partly.”

  “What else is at stake? Harry? What else?”

  “I made a bargain,” he said. “With my father.”

  “A bargain? What sort of bargain?”

  “I promised that, if I lose the wager, I’ll stop messing about with motorcars and take up some . . . respectable profession.”

  “Something suitable for a gentleman, is that it?”

  Harry nodded glumly.

  “I’ve always hated it,” said Elizabeth, “when people told me I should behave more like a lady. I never considered the fact that men are expected to behave in a certain fashion as well.” She rested her back against the door of the Flash. The aluminum was warm from the fire. “So if you win, you’ll just go on . . . how did you put it? Messing about?”

  “I can’t think of any career I could bear to be stuck in.”

  “Well, if the Flash makes it around the world, everyone will want a vehicle just like her. You could always make a career out of building motorcars.”

  “I’m no businessman. And all I know about machinery is what I’ve learned from working alongside Johnny on the Flash.”

  “That’s what engineering schools are for, Harry.”

  “School? I wouldn’t have the patience for it. I couldn’t even make it through Eton.”

  Elizabeth gazed at him curiously. “This isn’t the Harry Fogg I know. I’ve never heard you sound anything but cocksure and confident.”

  “I’m just being realistic. I’m not very good at sticking with things.”

  “Well, then, I suppose you’ll just have to go on messing about, won’t you? Unless, of course, you lose the wager.”

  “I won’t lose.”

  Elizabeth gave him an arch look. “That’s what you said when you took on the electric motorcar.”

  Ordinarily Elizabeth didn’t hesitate to give herself a leading role in her newspaper stories, but in her account of the auto accident, she neglected for once to mention the major part she played:Ogden, Utah, August 28

  Our long-suffering motorcar has suffered a blow that, for a time, seemed likely to be fatal. As we drove along a narrow road through the mountains, a boulder tumbled from the steep slope beside us and collided with the car, bending the steering rod and crushing the condenser. (For those readers unfamiliar with automotive terminology, the condenser is a device that captures steam and returns it to the engine in liquid form.)

  Our marvelous mechanic, Mr. Shaugnessey, made temporary repairs that allowed us to limp into Rock Springs—too small a town, unfortunately, to have a decent machine shop. After taking on water and kerosene, we set off again. In the course of the day we crossed three small rivers; each time we topped up the water tank.

  By the next day we were in Utah Territory. We followed the railroad into Ogden, a prosperous city with the tools and materials needed to make more repairs to the unfortunate Flash, which has come to seem less like a mere machine than like a courageous companion.

  Elizabeth tried to convince Harry, who was still far from well, to take a hotel room, but he refused. “We’ll need the money later on,” he said. His pride wouldn’t let him tell her—or Johnny—the whole truth: Even if he didn’t spend another dime between Ogden and San Francisco, he would be hard-pressed to pay for their passage across the Pacific. If they traveled steerage, he might just be able to manage it—for all the good it would do. They could hardly expect to get through all of Asia and Europe with no money at all.

  That was the worst part about being idle: all the problems that he had been so carefully ignoring now had a chance to rear their heads. One of the things he had ignored, in his rush to rack up the miles, was his mother. He had promised to wire her from time to time, to let her know he was still alive and well.

  Elizabeth would have welcomed a cozy, clean hotel room, no matter what the cost. But she felt obliged to share the livery stable with the others, to demonstrate once again that she was no Miss Mollycoddle. After she had made herself more presentable, she announced, “I’m going to see whether the telegraph office is still open.”

  “Would you mind sending a wire for me?” said Harry.

  “If you’re sure you trust me to do it properly.”

  Harry grinned. “Just don’t drive there, all right?”

  Elizabeth couldn’t suppress a smile. She drew out her notepad. “To whom shall I send it?”

  “Aouda Fogg, Number Seven, Savile Row, London.”

  She paused and gave him a curious glance. “Your mother? That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Believe me, if I were being sarcastic, you’d know. What message would you like me to send?”

  “I don’t know. Something on the order of ‘Flash is holding up well, so am I, more later.’”

  “Are you sure that’s not too emotional? It may bring her to tears.”

  “Now you’re being sarcastic.”

  “Just a little, perhaps.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to say. You’re the writer; you think of something.”

  The telegram she sent on his behalf read AM IN FINE HEALTH AND SPIRITS EXCEPT FOR MISSING YOU DEAR MOTHER YOUR LOVING SON HARI and it did, in fact, bring Aouda Fogg to tears.

  Harry considered asking his mother to wire him a few hundred pounds. But he didn’t want to give the impression that he was in trouble. Somehow or other he would come up with the money, he was certain of it. It was a pity Charles had turned out to be such a rotter. If he had stayed, he might have been persuaded to keep them in kerosene, at least.

  Though Harry didn’t like to admit it, he missed having Charles to keep track of all those niggling little details such as mileage and dates and the like. Harry was not good with details. He was, at least, fairly certain of the date. Back in Rawlins, they had determined that it was the twenty-sixth of August. That would make today the twenty-eighth, which gave them an entire week to reach San Francisco.

  Unfortunately the repairs to the Flash ate up two of those seven days. By the second day, Harry was feeling like himself again—that is to say, so impatient that he could hardly bear it. To keep himself occupied, he removed the rear seat and set about cleaning the engine. Though Johnny had cast and machined all the parts with the utmost care, a little oil inevitably seeped from around the valves, and dust became caked on the cylinders.

  As he wiped out the engine compartment, an object caught in the rag. Harry untangled the thing and examined it. “Johnny. Have a look at this.”

  Johnny slid out from beneath the car. “What is it?”

  “
A fountain pen. Wonder how it got there.” Harry couldn’t help noticing the guilty look on Johnny’s lopsided face. “Do you know?”

  Johnny nodded. “Hardiman said he lost it. I didn’t believe him.”

  “Ah. So when you caught him ‘red-handed,’ he may not have been sabotaging the car at all? He may merely have been looking for his pen?”

  “Maybe.” Johnny gave him an anxious glance. “Are you angry, Harry?”

  Harry put a hand on friend’s shoulder. “No, lad, no. You were only trying to protect the Flash. I’d have done the same thing. Poor Hardiman. It appears we may have been wrong about him. Now he’ll have to try to explain to his father why he quit. I don’t envy him.” Harry could imagine all too well how a chap might feel, returning to London without having proven a thing, either to himself or to his father.

  TWENTY-TWO In which

  A TRAVELER AND A DAY ARE LOST

  The following morning they left Ogden behind at last, but Harry continued to cling close to the railroad. According to the owner of the livery stable, the land that lay between here and San Francisco was mostly desert, with nothing resembling a real town, only a few gold-mining camps. If they ran into trouble, the railroad would be their only lifeline.

  They had loaded the motorcar down with extra cans of kerosene and water. Though they were within sight of the Great Salt Lake for most of the day, they couldn’t draw water from it; the high concentration of salt would have played havoc with the boiler and the pipes.

  The land was almost completely barren. They passed at least a dozen bleached skeletons of horses and mules and oxen that had perished trying to haul some gold seeker’s wagon to California or Nevada. To block the sun, they raised the leather rain hood of the Flash, but it turned the interior of the car into an oven.

  Harry handed the wheel over to Johnny and caught a few hours of fitful, sweaty sleep. Around dusk, he took over and drove through the night, stopping only once to take on water from a railroad storage tank. Late the next day, they reached the Humboldt River. It wasn’t much compared with the broad Platte, which they had followed through Nebraska; still, after three hundred miles of parched land it was a welcome sight. Since they were nearly out of kerosene, they filled the storage box with birch and juniper twigs for fuel.

  Harry considered driving through the night again, but the carbide for the lamps was running low, too; so was his energy. With only four days left before the ship sailed for Hong Kong, he couldn’t afford to fall sick again. They camped by the Humboldt and in the morning followed the river westward. After another night spent in the wild, they reached Reno, a busy mining town at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. The mountains promised to be a bit of a struggle, but after that it should be a quick and easy run to San Francisco. According to Harry’s reckoning they still had two days to get there.

  They had their first decent meal in days, and Elizabeth filed her first dispatch since leaving Ogden, then they climbed aboard the Flash again. As in the Appalachians and the Rockies, the only practical route over the Sierras was the one laid out by the railroad. They passed through a landscape of such rugged, breath-stopping beauty that Elizabeth exclaimed, “Oh, look!” at least once every ten minutes. Harry couldn’t look for long, lest he drive off the railroad ties.

  Trains were scarcer out here than in the Eastern states—luckily, since the roadbed was seldom wide enough to accommodate both a motorcar and a train. They spent most of their time either bumping along over insubstantial-looking trestles that spanned sickeningly deep gorges or else creeping through incredibly long, dark tunnels carved from solid rock.

  Near the summit, the tracks were enclosed by a series of long, low sheds designed to keep the route clear of snow. These shelters created a wooden tunnel that stretched, unbroken, for miles. “Well,” said Harry, “here’s a poser. If we meet a train inside there, we’ll have nowhere to go. And there’s no telling when the next one will turn up.”

  “Of course there is,” said Elizabeth. “It’s called a timetable.”

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get one.”

  “Fortunately”—with a flourish, she produced a crumpled railroad schedule from her reticule—“I did.”

  “Good thinking,” said Harry.

  Elizabeth shrugged. “I take no credit for it. Charles left it in his room; I merely picked it up.”

  According to the timetable, the next train wasn’t due for two hours. “So unless those sheds stretch on for twenty miles,” said Harry, “we should make it through easily.”

  “Assuming the Flash doesn’t break down,” said Elizabeth.

  “There’s no reason she should. Is there, Johnny?”

  “I—I don’t know,” murmured the mechanic.

  Elizabeth placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’re still having that feeling, aren’t you? That there’s something wrong with the car.”

  Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  “Well, if she does plan to break down,” said Harry, “I hope she holds off until we’re in the open again.” Taking a deep breath, he drove forward, into the mouth of the first shelter. A little sun seeped through the cracks between the boards, but not enough to see the tracks clearly. It was hard for Harry to keep the wheels on the ties.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” said Elizabeth anxiously.

  “No!” snapped Harry. His voice echoed from the wooden walls. “Sorry,” he said more softly. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  There didn’t seem to be enough air inside the shelters; Harry found himself struggling to catch his breath. The Flash seemed to be chuffing more heavily than usual, too, but perhaps it was just due to the echo. When one shed ended, there was a bright gap several feet wide before the next began. Harry stopped in one of these, wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, and asked, “How much time do we have?”

  Elizabeth checked her watch. “We’ve been in here only twenty minutes.”

  “It seems like an hour,” said Harry. “I hope the trains are running on schedule. And I hope your watch is correct.” He drove on, peering into the gloom for any hint of a locomotive’s headlamp.

  At last they emerged from the succession of sheds, squinting in the sunlight like miners surfacing after a long shift underground. The western slope of the Sierras lay spread before them and, in the distance, the broad green Sacramento Valley. “My goodness,” said Elizabeth. “Look at this.”

  “I know, I know,” said Harry. “It’s beautiful. But I need to keep my eyes on the tracks.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the scenery,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve just glanced at the receipt given me by the telegraph clerk in Reno. I dated my dispatch the third of September.”

  “So?”

  “So, this receipt is dated September fourth.”

  “Well, I’m sure your editor will forgive you for—” Harry broke off suddenly. “Wait a moment. This is the fourth? Today?”

  “If Western Union is correct.”

  Harry’s stomach lurched, but he tried to remain calm. “Would you please look at the steamship schedule and see when our ship departs for Hong Kong?”

  Elizabeth consulted the table on the back of the train schedule. “Let me see. The City of Peking, right? It sets sail at two P.M. on . . . on Saturday, the fifth.” She paused, then added, in a puzzled tone, “But—but that’s—”

  Harry nodded grimly. “That’s tomorrow.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “If we miss it, how long must we wait for another?”

  “The next ship for Hong Kong sails on . . . September twenty-eighth.”

  Harry gave a tortured groan. “That’s more than three weeks! We can’t afford to lose three weeks!”

  “But surely we can’t make it to San Francisco by two o’clock tomorrow. Can we?”

  Harry took a deep breath, then turned to deliver his trademark grin. “Well, if you’ll pardon my language,” he said, “we can give it a demmed good try.”

  Now that they were on the downhill side o
f the Sierras, Harry abandoned the tracks in favor of the wagon road. Though it had been impossibly narrow and rocky all the way through the mountains, the road was gradually becoming wider and smoother.

  Harry turned the wheel over to Johnny. “I’d better get some sleep. We’ll have to travel all night.”

  Elizabeth let him have the rear seat. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise I shan’t try to drive again.”

  By the time they reached Sacramento, the sun had been up for hours. They had plenty of kerosene, so Harry stopped only long enough to bolt down some breakfast in the dining room of Ebner’s Hotel. “If you don’t mind,” said Elizabeth, “I’d like to freshen up a bit.”

  Harry wasn’t sure just what freshening up entailed, but he didn’t think it polite to ask. “All right. Ten minutes, no more.” As he left the hotel, carrying a plate of food for Johnny, he glanced at the clock behind the desk. Eight-fifteen. “Is that correct?” he asked the clerk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The steamer for Hong Kong would depart at two o’clock. That gave them almost six hours. “How far to San Francisco?”

  “A hundred miles, if you go the long way, around the Bay. If you take the road to Oakland and catch a ferry, you’ll cut off a good twenty miles.”

  Johnny had kept up a good head of steam, so the Flash was ready to travel the moment Elizabeth turned up. But the ten minutes she had been granted turned into fifteen, then twenty, and still she did not appear. “Where the deuce can she be?” said Harry. “It can’t possibly take that long to freshen up, can it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnny.

  When another ten minutes went by, Harry could bear it no longer. “I’m going to look for her. If she comes back here in the meantime, give a blast on the whistle.”

  No one in the hotel had seen her since she left the dining room. A maid checked the women’s lounge; it was empty. Baffled, Harry returned to the car. “No sign of her?” Johnny shook his head. “The devil take it!” said Harry. “What do we do now?”