Page:Traffics and Discoveries.djvu/203



"She don’t seem to 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."

"You manurial gardener——" Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft’s stiffening knee.

"Also—on information received-drunk and disorderly in charge of a motor-car—to the common danger—two men like sailors in appearance," the man went on.