PAGE 10
Whose Business Is To Live
by
“Here!–what are you up to!” Wemple demanded suddenly of Drexel, who had exposed himself to fish a rifle out of the car.
“Going to show the skunks what shooting is,” was his answer.
“No, you don’t,” Wemple said. “We’re not here to fight, but to get this party to Tampico.” He remembered Peter Tonsburg’s remark. “Whose business is to live, Charley–that’s our business. Anybody can get killed. It’s too easy these days.”
Still under fire, they moored at the north shore, and when Davies had tossed overboard the igniter from the ferry engine and commandeered ten gallons of its surplus gasoline, they took the steep, soft road up the bank in a rush.
“Look at her climb,” Drexel uttered gleefully. “That Aliso hill won’t bother us at all. She’ll put a crimp in it, that’s what she’ll do.”
“It isn’t the hill, it’s the sharp turn of the zig-zag that’s liable to put a crimp in her,” Davies answered. “That road was never laid out for autos, and no auto has ever been over it. They steamboated this one up.”
But trouble came before Aliso was reached. Where the road dipped abruptly into a small jag of hollow that was almost V-shaped, it arose out and became a hundred yards of deep sand. In order to have speed left for the sand after he cleared the stiff up-grade of the V, Drexel was compelled to hit the trough of the V with speed. Wemple clutched Miss Drexel as she was on the verge of being bounced out. Mrs. Morgan, too solid for such airiness, screamed from the pain of the bump; and even the imperturbable Juanita fell to crossing herself and uttering prayers with exceeding rapidity.
The car cleared the crest and encountered the sand, going slower from moment to moment, slewing and writhing and squirming from side to side. The men leaped out and began shoving. Miss Drexel urged Juanita out and followed. But the car came to a standstill, and Drexel, looking back and pointing, showed the first sign of being beaten. Two things he pointed to: a constitutional soldier on horseback a quarter of a mile in the rear; and a portion of the narrow road that had fallen out bodily on the far slope of the V.
“Can’t get at this sand unless we go back and try over, and we ditch the car if we try to back up that.”
The ditch was a huge natural sump-hole, the stagnant surface of which was a-crawl with slime twenty feet beneath.
Davies and Wemple sprang to take the boy’s place.
“You can’t do it,” he urged. “You can get the back wheels past, but right there you hit that little curve, and if you make it your front wheel will be off the bank. If you don’t make it, your back wheel’ll be off.”
Both men studied it carefully, then looked at each other.
“We’ve got to,” said Davies.
“And we’re going to,” Wemple said, shoving his rival aside in comradely fashion and taking the post of danger at the wheel. “You’re just as good as I at the wheel, Davies,” he explained. “But you’re a better shot. Your job’s cut out to go back and hold off any Greasers that show up.”
Davies took a rifle and strolled back with so ominous an air that the lone cavalryman put spurs to his horse and fled. Mrs. Morgan was helped out and sent plodding and tottering unaided on her way to the end of the sand stretch. Miss Drexel and Juanita joined Charley in spreading the coats and robes on the sand and in gathering and spreading small branches, brush, and armfuls of a dry, brittle shrub. But all three ceased from their exertions to watch Wemple as he shot the car backward down the V and up. The car seemed first to stand on one end, then on the other, and to reel drunkenly and to threaten to turn over into the sump-hole when its right front wheel fell into the air where the road had ceased to be. But the hind wheels bit and climbed the grade and out.