But again, after the car rested a minute, the light, dry earth began to crack and crumble away from under the tires, rolling in a miniature avalanche down the steep declivity into the water.  And not until Wemple had backed fifty yards down the narrow road did he find solid resting for the car.  He came ahead on foot and examined the acute angle formed by the two zig-zags.  Together with Davies he planned what was to be done.

“When you come you’ve got to come a-humping,” Davies advised.  “If you stop anywhere for more than seconds, it’s good night, and the walking won’t be fine.”

“She’s full of fight, and she can do it.  See that hard formation right there on the inside wall.  It couldn’t have come at a better spot.  If I don’t make her hind wheels climb half way up it, we’ll start walking about a second thereafter.”

“She’s a two-fisted piece of machinery,” Davies encouraged.  “I know her kind.  If she can’t do it, no machine can that was ever made.  Am I right, Beth?”

“She’s a regular, spunky she-devil,” Miss Drexel laughed agreement.  “And so are the pair of you—­er—­of the male persuasion, I mean.”

Miss Drexel had never seemed so fascinating to either of them as she was then, in the excitement quite unconscious of her abbreviated costume, her brown hair flying, her eyes sparkling, her lips smiling.  Each man caught the other in that moment’s pause to look, and each man sighed to the other and looked frankly into each other’s eyes ere he turned to the work at hand.

Wemple came up with his usual rush, but it was a gauged rush; and Davies took the post of danger, the outside running board, where his weight would help the broad tires to bite a little deeper into the treacherous surface.  If the road-edge crumbled away it was inevitable that he would be caught under the car as it rolled over and down to the river.

It was ahead and reverse, ahead and reverse, with only the briefest of pauses in which to shift the gears.  Wemple backed up the hard formation on the inside bank till the car seemed standing on end, rushed ahead till the earth of the outer edge broke under the front tires and splashed in the water.  Davies, now off, and again on the running board when needed, accompanied the car in its jerky and erratic progress, tossing robes and coats under the tires, calling instructions to Drexel similarly occupied on the other side, and warning Miss Drexel out of the way.

“Oh, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds,” Wemple muttered aloud, as if in prayer, as he wrestled the car about the narrow area, gaining sometimes inches in pivoting it, sometimes fetching back up the inner wall precisely at the spot previously attained, and, once, having the car, with the surface of the roadbed under it, slide bodily and sidewise, two feet down the road.

The clapping of Miss Drexel’s hands was the first warning Davies received that the feat was accomplished, and, swinging on to the running board, he found the car backing in the straight-away up the next zig-zag and Wemple still chanting ecstatically, “Oh, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds!”