It was nearly six hours later that Daisy Etta came and woke them up. Night was receding before a paleness in the east, and a fresh ocean breeze had sprung up. Kelly had taken the first lookout and Al the second, letting Tom rest the night out. And Tom was far too tired to argue the arrangement. Al had immediately fallen asleep on his watch, but fear had such a sure, cold hold on his vitals that the first faint growl of the big Diesel engine snapped him erect. He tottered on the edge of the tall neck of earth that they slept on and squeaked as he scrabbled to get his balance.
“What’s giving?” asked Kelly, instantly wide awake.
“It’s coming,” blubbered Al. “Oh, my, oh my—”
Kelly stood up and stared into the fresh, dark dawn. The motor boomed hollowly, in a peculiar way heard twice at the same time as it was thrown to them and echoed back by the bluffs under and around them.
“It’s coming and what are we goin’ to do?” chanted Al. “What is going to happen?”
“My head is going to fall off,” said Tom sleepily. He rolled to a sitting position, holding the brutalized member between his hands. “If that egg behind my ear hatches, it’ll come out a full-sized jack-hammer.” He looked at Kelly. “Where is she?”
“Don’t rightly know,” said Kelly. “Somewhere down around the camp.”
“Probably pickin’ up our scent.”
“Figure it can do that?”
“I figure it can do anything,” said Tom. “Al, stop your moanin’.”
The sun slipped its scarlet edge into the thin slot between sea and sky, and rosy light gave each rock and tree a shape and a shadow. Kelly’s gaze swept back and forth, back and forth, until, minutes later, he saw movement.
“There she is!”
“Where?”
“Down by the grease rack.”
Tom rose and stared. “What’s she doin’?”
After an interval Kelly said, “She’s workin’. Diggin’ a swale in front of the fuel drums.”
“You don’t say. Don’t tell me she’s goin’ to give herself a grease job.”
“She don’t need it. She was completely greased and new oil put in the crankcase after we set her up. But she might need fuel.”
“Not more’n half a tank.”
“Well, maybe she figures she’s got a lot of work to do today.” As Kelly said this Al began to blubber. They ignored him.
The fuel drums were piled in a pyramid at the edge of the camp, in forty-four-gallon drums piled on there sides. The Seven was moving back and forth in front of them, close up, making pass after pass, gouging earth up and wasting it out past the pile. She soon had a huge pit scooped out, about fourteen feet wide, six feet deep and thirty feet long, right at the very edge of the pile of drums.
“What do you reckon she’s playin’ at?”
“Search me. She seems to want fuel, but I don’t… look at that! She’s stopped in the hole;… turnin’… smashing the top corner of the mouldboard into one of the drums on the bottom!”
Tom scraped the stubble on his jaw with his nails. “An’ you wonder how much that critter can do! Why, she’s got the whole thing figured out. She knows if she tried to punch a hole in a fuel drum that she’d only kick it around. If she did knock a hole in it, how’s she going to lift it? She’s not equipped to handle hose, so… see? Look at her now! She just gets herself lower than the bottom drum on the pile, and punches a hole. She can do that then, with the whole weight of the pile holding it down. Then she backs her tank under the stream of fuel runnin’ out!”
“How’d she get the cap off?”
Tom snorted and told them how the radiator cap had come off its hinges as he vaulted over the hood the day Rivera was hurt.
“You know,” he said after a moment’s thought, “if she knew as much then as she does now, I’d be snoozin’ beside Rivera and Peebles. She just didn’t know her way around then. She run herself like she’d never run before. She’s learned plenty since.”
“She has,” said Kelly, “and here’s where she uses it on us. She’s headed this way.”
She was. Straight out across the roughed-out runway she came, grinding along over the dew-sprinkled earth, yesterday’s dust swirling up from under her tracks. Crossing the shoulder line, she took the rougher ground skilfully, angling up over the occasional swags in the earth, by-passing stones, riding free and fast and easily. It was the first time Tom had actually seen her clearly running without an operator, and his flesh crept as he watched. The machine was unnatural, her outline somehow unreal and dreamlike purely through the lack of the small silhouette of a man in the saddle. She looked hulked, compact, dangerous.
“What are we gonna do?” wailed Al Knowles.
“We’re gonna sit and wait,” said Kelly, “and you’re gonna shut your trap. We won’t know for five minutes yet whether she’s going to go after us from down below or from up here.”
“If you want to leave,” said Tom gently, “go right ahead.” Al sat down.
Kelly looked ruminatively down at his beloved power shovel, sitting squat and unlovely in the cut below them and away to their right. “How do you reckon she’d stand up against the dipper stick?”
“If it ever came to a rough-and-tumble,” said Tom, “I’d say it would be just too bad for Daisy Etta. But she wouldn’t fight. There’s no way you could get the shovel within punchin’ range; Daisy’d just stand there and laugh at you.”
“I can’t see her now,” whined Al.
Tom looked. “She’s taken the bluff. She’s going to try it from up here. I move we sit tight and see if she’s foolish enough to try to walk out here over that narrow neck. If she does, she’ll drop on her belly with one track on each side. Probably turn herself over trying to dig out.”
The wait then was interminable. Back over the hill they could hear the labouring motor; twice they heard the machine stop momentarily to shift gears. Once they looked at each other hopefully as the sound rose to a series of bellowing roars, as if she were backing and filling; then they realized that she was trying to take some particularly steep part of the bank and having trouble getting traction. But she made it; the motor revved up as she made the brow of the hill, and she shifted into fourth gear and came lumbering out into the open. She lurched up to the edge of the cut, stopped, throttled down, dropped her blade on the ground and stood there idling. Al Knowles backed away to the very edge of the tongue of earth they stood on, his eyes practically on stalks.
“O.K. — put up or shut up,” Kelly called across harshly.
“She’s looking the situation over,” said Tom. “That narrow pathway don’t fool her a bit.”
Daisy Etta’s blade began to rise, and stopped just clear of the ground. She shifted without clashing her gears, began to back slowly, still a little more than an idle.
“She’s gonna jump,” screamed Al. “I’m gettin’ out of here!”
“Stay here, you fool,” shouted Kelly. “She can’t get us as long as we’re up here! If you go down, she’ll hunt you down like a rabbit.”
The blast of the Seven’s motor was the last straw for Al. He squeaked and hopped over the edge, scrambling and sliding down the almost sheer face of the cut. He hit the bottom running.
Daisy Etta lowered her blade and raised her snout and growled forward, the blade loading. Six, seven, seven and a half cubic yards of dirt piled up in front of her as she neared the edge. The loaded blade bit into the narrow pathway that led out to their perch. It was almost all soft, white, crumbly marl, and the great machine sank nose down into it, the monstrous overload of topsoil spilling down on each side.