I'd have to go to prison for the next offense without the option
of a fine. The expert was one of the nicest men you ever saw,
and we used to take off cylinder heads, and adjust cams, and
spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them
together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without
him. He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you
suppose he did? I was lying under the machine at the time,
studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle.
Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my
mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it over for about five
minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he
took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he had
been so patient in explaining things, and never got tired of
being asked the same question fifty times. He wiped his eyes
with some cotton waste and told me that even if years were to
pass and oceans and continents divide us, I had only to say
'come' and he'd come--that is, if I ever got into real trouble
with the Manton.

"When it came to saying good-by to him I let him take my cap as a
keepsake and accepted a dynamo igniter that he guaranteed not
to burn out the wires (though that's exactly what it did a week
afterward) and it was all too sad for anything. The governor,
you know, that was attached to the igniter, got stuck somehow,
and of course the current just sizzled up the plug. Then, when
I had been running the machine for about a week and doing
splendidly with it, Captain Cartwright turned up from Washington.
I suppose I wasn't so pleased as I ought to have been to see him,
for though we were engaged and all that, there were wheels within
wheels and--you know how silly girls are and what fool things