Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/115

Then I went out into the night again and turned old 464 towards Post Two. It was a great treat riding with my headlights on full blast and I hated to turn them off again at Brocourt. It became very difficult driving after this, and I was almost sorry that I had used my lights at all, for my eyes had grown accustomed to the glare and it was fully five minutes before I could see the road at all. I got along all right for a mile or so after this, but when I neared the long hill leading down into the village of Dombasle, my sight failed me completely. The car seemed to be hitting an endless series of great "thank you mam's" which shot the front wheels high up in the air and brought them down with a terrific crash onto the stony road. To save my life, I couldn't see what the trouble was or what the obstacles blocking the road were. I went pounding on down the hill, hanging on to the wheel for dear life as I bounced from one of these awful things to another. And finally, when a speck of moon peeped out from behind a cloud, I saw what was causing the trouble. There, spread out carefully on each side of the road, at intervals of perhaps twenty-five feet, were piles of crushed rock, ten or twelve inches high, which the repairers had dumped there. I had been trying to straddle these as I came down and would have soon run smack into the bank if my old friend, the moon, hadn't appeared.