—
Isaac Bell dodged rifle fire and a blizzard of stone splinters to vault into Wish Clarke’s Peerless so he could feed the belt into the Maxim gun. But Wish was pinned down under another car, from where he was shooting back with his pistol. Bell slid behind the Maxim, cocked it, and jerked the trigger, grinding out ten shots before the belt caught on the tripod.
He untangled it and fired ten more at a flicker of movement atop the ridge that stared down at them. Three riflemen leaped up and fired back. Bell triggered the Maxim, trying to hit them before the belt caught. Eight shots, ten shots, and this time the belt did not hang up on anything. The pounding machine gun had cleared the top of the ridge before he realized why. Edna Matters had jumped in beside him and was feeding the belt as smoothly as a veteran of the Zulu Wars.
“You could get killed doing this,” he said.
“Beats getting killed doing nothing.”
She stood up, thinking the fight was over. Feeding the belt into the gun had made her even more bulletproof than typing. She did not want to listen to the low voice in the back of her mind that nothing made anyone bulletproof except no bullets.
“Look out!”
Suddenly Isaac was roaring in her ear, “Down! Down! Get down!”
28
An immense boulder, triple the size of the others, flew at the auto.
Isaac shoved Edna down. It cleared their heads by inches and hit the guard wall that stood between the edge of the road and a sheer drop. It smashed through the wall, scattering stones, and tumbled into the ravine. Shouts of triumph from the top of the slope announced another rolling at them.
—
“IB was both right and wrong last night,” Edna Matters typed in the morning.
The air was bitter cold. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was full of dust clouds. Wish Clarke sat behind the Maxim gun. He was covering the ridge at the top of the slope. Isaac Bell was starting to climb it with field glasses around his neck and a revolver in his hand. He was hoping to spot Tiflis and a route on which they could make a run for the capital city.
Thanks to taking cover under an overhang of rock. WC and Envoy Stone and sister Nellie were not flattened by giant boulders. IB and I were also extremely lucky where we shivered all the long, cold night. But the last boulder that thundered down the hill before it was too dark for our enemies to aim another smashed us dead center.
We are down to two Peerlesses. We managed to rescue some of the water before the wreck fell into the ravine and was swept downstream in a furious torrent. But we could save none of the tinned food and none of the extra gasoline, which presents a serious difficulty as we very likely do not have enough gasoline left to reach Tiflis even though we believe it is close, just over the hills that we somehow got on the wrong side of when we got lost yesterday.
Looking on the bright side, as Detective WC is wont to say, the renegade Cossacks, or Social Democrat revolutionaries, appear to have been thoroughly routed. Though whether that is true, we don’t really know, as the night had turned dark as a coal mine by the time the boulders stopped hurtling and the shooting had stopped. I am absolutely certain that this reporter is not the first from the civilized world to say, ‘Thank God for the Maxim gun.’
Additional credit goes to IB, WC, and sister Nellie, who had refused to return Envoy Stone’s pistol. As we prepared to get under way in our remaining two autos, IB read over my shoulder and demanded edits. He asked me to write the following, which embarrasses me in its immodesty. He demanded I write that EMH was a dependable belt feeder who allowed him to employ our Maxim gun to great advantage.
IB then demanded I change the word ‘dependable’ to ‘superlative.’ Everyone’s an editor. But to be fair, poor Isaac is reeling on his feet.
My sister Nellie has fallen in love with him.
Edna Matters stared at the page.
Who had written that? If a typewriter could blurt, the machine had blurted it out.
She glanced over her shoulder. Isaac had started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped. Something up the road had caught his attention. She raised her fingers to the keys and typed slowly.
Nellie is not the easiest person to read. In fact, she is often a cipher, a blank slate behind her smile. But in this case, I can see that she has fallen hard for IB.
Which creates quite a quandary as I have, too. Starting the night in New York he helped me through my other quandary. Which I believe means I fell first . . . However, being first on line won’t help me one bit. My dear Isaac is falling for her. He doesn’t know it yet. But I can tell. I wouldn’t call it love. But he is fascinated and, being a man, probably doesn’t know the difference—
She stopped typing and cocked her ear to listen. Someone was shouting down the slope in broken English.
—
“They’re waving a white flag,” Isaac Bell called down to Wish Clarke.
It looked like a dirty shirt tied by its sleeve to a rifle. The man waving stepped warily into view and Isaac Bell immediately recognized the black, wavy pompadour hair. It was Josef the Georgian chauffeur he had befriended in Baku. The one that the other chauffeurs claimed was an informer for the secret police.
“What’s he yelling?” asked Wish.