"All right, Mr. Barton let's find out what you've done," she muttered grimly. "Let's start on the fuel system." She rolled up her sleeves and tied a scarf firmly around her hair. Her five hefty helpers watched with awe as she approached the engine compartment and lifted the cowling, and then they crowded forward to get a good view and offer their advice. She had to beat them back and shoo them away before she could begin work, but then she was completely absorbed in her task, and in half an hour had checked an tested the fuel system, making sure that gasoline was travelling freely from the tank along the lines to carburettor and cylinders, and that the pump was functioning smoothly.
"Right, now let's check out the electrics, she muttered to herself, and turned irritably as an insistent hand tugged at her belt, breaking her concentration.
"Yes, what is it?" Her expression changed, lighting up happily as she saw who it was.
"Sara!" She embraced the girl. "How on earth did you get here?"
"I escaped, Miss Camberwell. It was so boring in the hospital. I had my father's men bring a horse for me and I climbed out of the window and rode down the gorge."
"What about your friend the young doctor?"
Vicky demanded, still holding the girl and surprised by the strength of her affection for her.
"Oh, him!" Sara's voice held a world of scorn and contempt. "He was the most boring thing in the hospital.
Doctor! Ha! He knows nothing about how a body works I had to try and teach him, and that was no fun."
"And your leg?" she asked.
"How is your leg?"
"It is nothing almost well." Sara tried to dismiss the injury but Vicky saw that she was drawn and haggard. The long, rough ride down the gorge must have taxed her, and as Vicky led her tenderly to a seat in the shade of the acacias, she favoured the injured leg heavily.
"I heard there is going to be a battle. That's really why I came.
I heard the Italians are advancing-" She looked round her brightly, seeming to thrust her pain and weariness aside. "Where are Jake and Gareth? Where is Gregorius? We must not miss the battle, Miss Camberwell "That's what I am working on." Vicky's smile faded. "They have left us behind."
"What!" Sara's bright look became bellicose and then outraged as Vicky explained how they had been edged out.
"Men! You cannot trust them, "fumed Sara. "If they aren't trying to tip you on your back, then it's something worse.
We aren't going to let them do it, are we?"
"No," Vicky agreed.
"We are most certainly not." With Sara beside her, it was impossible to continue her work on the armoured car, for the girl made up for a total ignorance of the mechanism by an unbounded curiosity and when Vicky should have been inspecting the magneto, she found instead that she was looking closely at the back of Sara's head which had been interposed.
After she had forcibly elbowed her aside for the sixth time, she asked with exasperation, "Do you know how to fire a Vickers machine gun?"
"I am a mountain girl," boasted Sara. "I was born with a gun in one hand and a horse between my legs."
"Or what have you?" murmured Vicky, and the girl grinned impishly.
"But have you ever fired a Vickers?"
"No," admitted Sara reluctantly, and then brightened.
"But it won't take me long to find out how it works."
"There!"
Vicky indicated the thick water-jacketed barrel that protruded from the turret. "Go ahead." When Sara scrambled awkwardly on to the sponson, still favouring the leg, Vicky could return to her inspection. It was another half hour before she exclaimed, "He has taken the carbon rod out of the distributor. Oh, the sneaky swine." Sara's head popped out of the turret. "Gareth?"she asked.
"No," answered Vicky. "Jake."
"I didn't expect it of him." Sara climbed down beside Vicky to inspect the damage.
"They're all the same."
"Where has he hidden it?"
"Probably in his own pocket."
"What are we going to do?" Sara wrung her hands anxiously.
"We'll miss the battle!" Vicky thought a moment and then her expression changed. "In my bag, in the tent, is an Ever-Ready flashlight.
There is also a leather cosmetic case. Bring them both to me, please." One of the flashlight dry-cell batteries, split open by the curved blade of the dagger from Sara's belt, yielded a thick carbon rod from its core, and Vicky shaped it carefully with the nail-file from her cosmetic case, until it slipped neatly into the central shaft of the distributor and the engine fired at the first swing of the crank.
"You are really very clever, Miss Camberwell, said Sara, with such patent and solemn sincerity that Vicky was deeply touched. She smiled up at the girl who stood above the driver's seat, her head and shoulders in the turret and her knees braced against the back of the driver's seat.
"Think you can work that gun yet?" she asked, and Sara nodded uncertainly and placed her slim dark hands on the clumsy mahogany pistol grips, standing on tiptoe to squint through the sights.
"Just take me to them, Miss Camberwell." Vicky let out the clutch and swung the car in a tight lock out from under the acacia" trees and on to the steep rocky track which led to the wide open grassland in the funnel of the mountains.
am very angry with Jake," declared Sara, clutching wildly for support as the car pounded and thumped over the rough track. "I did not expect him to behave that way hiding the carbon rod. That is more like Gareth. I am disappointed in him."
"You are?"
"Yes, I think we should punish him."
"How?"
"I think Gareth should be your lover," Sara stated firmly.
"I think that is how we will punish Jake." In between wrestling with the heavy steering, and dancing her feet over the steel pedals of brake and clutch, Vicky thought about what Sara had said. She thought also of Jake's broad rangy shoulders, and thickly muscled arms she thought about his mop of curly hair and that wide boyish grin that could change so quickly to a heavy frown.
Suddenly she realized how very much she wanted to be with him, and how she would miss him if he were gone.
"I must thank you for sorting out my affairs for me," she called to the girl in the turret. "You have a knack."
"It's a pleasure, Miss Camberwell," Sara called back. "It is just that I understand these things." As the afternoon wore on, so thunderheads of cloud "Aformed upon the mountains in the west. They soared into a sky of endless sapphire blue, smoothly rounded masses of silver that rolled and swirled with a ponderous majesty, swelling high and darkening to the colour of ripening grapes and old bruises.
Yet over the plain the sky was open, clear and high, and the sun burned down and heated the earth so that the air above it shimmered and danced, distorting vision and distance. At one moment the mountains were so close that it seemed they reached to the heavens and they must topple upon the small group of men crouched in the shade of the two concealed armoured cars; at the next they seemed remote and miniaturized by distance.
The sun had heated the hulls of the cars so that the steel would blister skin at a touch and the men who waited, all of them except Jake Barton and Gareth Swales, crawled like survivors of a catastrophe beneath the hulls, seeking relief from the unrelenting sun.
The heat was so intense that the gin rummy game had long been abandoned, and the two white men panted like dogs, the sweat drying instantly on their skins and crusting into a thin film of white salt crystals.