Death Devil's Bridge Read Online Free PDF

would suggest to his lordship’s horse-loving friends that the Marsdens had gone over to the enemy camp.
    â€œThere’s a bit of fine tuning to be done,” Charles said, pulling on his pipe. That was another of the benefits of life at Bishop’s Keep. There was leisure for scientific and technical experimentation. “So far, we have been operating only one of the three retorts, but I daresay—”
    â€œExcellent,” Bradford said hastily. He looked at Rolls, who was smoking a Turkish cigarette and sipping a cordial. “In that case, Charlie and I have a small favor to beg of you.”
    â€œActually, it’s a rather large favor,” Rolls said. He grinned easily at Charles, his eyes sparkling, and spoke with an almost schoolboy eagerness.
    Charles raised his eyebrows. “You need coal gas to power a combustion engine at your motorcar exhibition?” The thought that coal gas might serve as engine fuel had already occurred to him. Perhaps he might use it to power the single-cylinder stationary engine that now drove an experimental dynamo, which he hoped would soon electrify Bishop’s Keep. If, that is, he could overcome the servants’ concerns about what Kate termed “his explosive activities.”
    Rolls laughed. “We’ll need a great deal more gas than that. We’ll be lifting about a thousand pounds.”
    â€œLifting?” Charles asked, surprised. “You want me to fill a balloon, then.”
    â€œI told you he’s quick,” Bradford said to Rolls, with satisfaction. “Never misses a clue.”
    â€œI fear I have missed something, though,” the vicar said. “I thought we were to have a motorcar exhibition. And now we’re to have a balloon?”
    â€œThe idea is to attract the public’s attention,” Rolls explained. “We thought it would be jolly to have a balloon chase—hare and hounds, d’you see? The balloon sails off across country and the motorcars pursue it. The first to reach the balloon’s landing spot wins.”
    â€œAre you sure any will reach it?” Charles asked. “The lanes in this part of the country are atrocious. And the vehicles themselves are not dependable enough to—”
    â€œBut that doesn’t matter, don’t you see?” Rolls exclaimed. “It will be a glorious race, however it goes. And it will attract an enormous amount of attention,” he added happily.
    â€œAlready has,” Bradford muttered.
    Charles went to the shelf and took down a thick chemical reference work. He opened it to a table of gas properties, then pulled out his ivory slide rule. After a moment’s calculating, he said, “It appears that you’ll need between twenty to thirty thousand cubic feet of gas.”
    Rolls frowned. “That’s vastly more than we’d anticipated. Can you do it?”
    â€œWe don’t normally produce anything like that amount here,” Charles replied, “and my storage reservoir is quite small. But if we put the other two retorts into service, I daresay we can produce it in a day or so. And if the weather remains reasonably calm, the gas can be discharged directly into the balloon.” He looked from Bradford to Rolls. “I assume you have already procured one.”
    At Bradford’s nod, the vicar leaned forward eagerly. “Ballooning has long been a dream of mine. I knew a man who lived in Paris during the Prussian siege of ‘70. He was one of the aeronauts—oh, fortunate men!—who carried mail and emissaries out of the city.” His pale blue eyes shone. “ ‘I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?’ as Faust says. What a glorious excitement! I should like to have escaped Paris by balloon.”
    â€œOr flown over the Alps,” Rolls returned warmly, “like that Frenchman, Francisque Arban, in ’46. He ascended on the French side, during a storm that lifted