Around the World in 100 Days

From talking to the longshoremen, Harry learned that, instead of driving through Manhattan—and through the daunting mass of well-wishers—he could put the motorcar on a ferry, cross the Hudson River to New Jersey, and head west from there. It would mean missing the chance to see one of the world’s great cities, unfortunately. But this was not a sightseeing tour; it was a race against time.

They filled the Flash’s ten-gallon fuel tank with the last of the kerosene and lit the burner; in fifteen minutes, they had enough steam to drive the car aboard the ferry. A chorus of disappointed cries arose from the vast welcoming committee, who wanted a closer look at the car and its crew.

Since everyone had assumed the travelers would be going by way of Manhattan, there was no fanfare when they disembarked in Hoboken, and no crowd of admirers to slow them down. They took a second ferry to Newark and by five o’clock were in the open countryside, cruising along an old toll road at a gratifying speed.

A regular network of these former turnpikes was strung out across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They had once been the main arteries between cities, but the coming of the railroad had changed all that. The turnpikes were still used by farm wagons and by cyclists, though, so most were in reasonably good repair, and many were marked on maps.

Harry didn’t have much use for maps. He had been blessed with a good sense of direction, so he preferred to trust it and, if he got in trouble, ask for directions from the locals—who, it stood to reason, should know the neighborhood better than some printer in a city hundreds of miles away.

Charles, on the other hand, hated leaving anything to chance. He had purchased a map of the area and spent much of his time either peering nearsightedly at it—he had eyeglasses but was too vain to wear them, particularly in front of Elizabeth—or attempting to keep it from blowing out of the car.

Harry would not have minded so much, had Charles not insisted on calling out at regular intervals something on the order of “Now, when we reach New Brunswick, you’ll want to take the road to the right; otherwise we’ll end up in Atlantic City.” When he sensed one of these comments coming, Harry tried to find a bump or a pothole that would rattle the boy’s teeth.

Elizabeth was not fazed by this in the least. She merely hung on to her hat and cried “Whoo!” as though she were on a roller coaster. Aside from these deliberate jolts, the ride was so smooth that she asked, “What sort of suspension did you put on her, Mr. Shaugnessey?”

Johnny had pulled a kerchief over his head and was tying it under his chin to keep his cap in place. “Coil springs, ma’am,” he mumbled. “One on each wheel.”

“You might say he reinvented them,” Harry put in. “Coil springs have a tendency to break; these are made of a special alloy.”

Charles raised his eyes from the map. “According to this—” he started to say, but the breath went out of him as the car lurched over a half-buried rock.

Harry was not much on planning, either. He hadn’t thought to inquire whether Americans might have some laws about motorcars. But he had learned his lesson back in Marylebone about sharing the road. When he overtook a bicycle or a hay wagon, he slowed down and made a wide detour, calling out, “Motorcar coming! Motorcar coming!”

Despite his precautions, horses sometimes panicked at the sight of a large, self-propelled vehicle belching smoke. And more than one cyclist, either startled or fascinated by the Flash, went careening into a ditch.

Gradually the traffic thinned out, until at last the turnpike stretched ahead of them, unoccupied and unobstructed, all the way to the horizon. Harry, who was admittedly not burdened by cares even at the worst of times, felt such a fierce sense of freedom that he let out a whoop of delight.

“Wrong? Nothing is wrong. That’s the point! For the next one hundred days, we’ll have no responsibilities, no rules, no demands, no parental disapproval, only the open road before us. Isn’t it splendid?”

“Ninety days,” Charles reminded him. He glanced up at the darkening sky. “And it won’t be so splendid when those clouds decide to let loose.”

To Harry’s disgust, Charles’s gloomy outlook proved accurate. All afternoon, the sky grew more and more threatening; as they crossed the bridge over the Delaware River, they were caught in a drenching downpour. Harry halted and helped Johnny put up the rain hood, which had lain folded up accordion-style behind the rear seat. The leather cover was attached to a framework of steel rods; when the hood was raised, the rods locked into place to support it. As the wind picked up and began blowing rain into the cab, they pulled down the leather side curtains, which had small windows made of isinglass—thin sheets of mica.

When they reached Philadelphia, Charles took a hotel room, but Elizabeth remained with the others. “I don’t want any special treatment,” she insisted. “Besides, I can’t afford a hotel.”

When they tried to rent space in a livery stable, the owner regarded both the motorcar and Harry’s English banknotes with disdain. “I don’t take no foreign money. And even if I did, I wouldn’t share my roof with the very thing that’s going to put me out of business one day, would I?”

Elizabeth lifted the side curtain and showed the man her press pass. “You will be out of business far sooner,” she said sweetly, “if I tell my readers how you refused shelter to the son of the famous Phileas Fogg.”

When they were seated on bales of straw, drinking coffee and eating ham sandwiches provided by the stableman’s wife, Harry said, “That was quick thinking. Thank you.”

“Yes, well, in future could you please leave my father’s name out of it? I don’t like always feeling that I’m riding on his coattails.”

Harry couldn’t help laughing. “We’ve got one of those already.” He nodded at Johnny, who had taken up his oilcan and was lubricating everything on the car that could be lubricated.

“True. But he’s Mr. Edison’s older son, Thomas Junior. You can be the younger and less mechanically gifted son . . . Monkey Edison.”

Among Harry’s enviable qualities was the ability to fall asleep anywhere. He gathered straw into a soft though prickly mattress, spread a blanket over it, and was out like one of Mr. Edison’s electric lights. Ordinarily he would have slept soundly until morning, but halfway through the night he woke with the distinct sense that something was wrong.

He lay listening to the muted sounds around him—the horses sighing, the raindrops skipping along the roof, Johnny snoring—until he heard one that seemed out of place. It sounded like metal scraping metal and it seemed to come from the far end of the stable, where the Flash sat alongside half a dozen ordinary carriages.

Harry crept down the aisle toward the car. As he passed the adjacent horse stall, its occupant gave an uneasy snort. Harry froze in place, but it did no good. The skittish animal snorted again and danced nervously about, bumping the sides of the stall.

The scraping sound stopped. A moment later, a dark form slid from beneath the motorcar. Harry nearly called out, “Johnny?” But though Johnny had been known to work on the car at odd hours, he wouldn’t do so without an acetylene lamp. Besides, Harry could hear his friend’s familiar guttural snore issuing from the next stall.