Let it hang, bend it, hold it above him, lay it on _Uncle Sam's_ staunch, unfeeling arm of steel, he could not, _could_ not, get it rested.
The palm of his hand tingled with a kind of irritating feeling like chilblains, and he must be continually removing one or other hand from the bar so that he could reach one with the other.

It did not help him keep his poise.

If he could only scratch his right hand once and be done with it! But it annoyed him like a fly.
Up, up, up, they went, and passed a quaint, old, thatch-roofed house.
Crazy place to build a house! And the people in it--probably all they could do was to shrug their shoulders in that stupid way when asked a question in English.
He was losing his morale--was this dispatch-rider.
But near the top of the hill he regained it somewhat.

Perhaps he could make up for this lost time in some straight, level reach of road beyond.
Up, up, up, plowed _Uncle Sam_, one lonely splinter of shingle still bound within his spokes, and his poor, dented headlight bereft of its dignity.
"I've an idea the road turns north about a mile down," Tom said to himself, "and runs around through----" The words stopped upon his lips as _Uncle Sam_, still laboring upward, reached level ground, and as if to answer Tom out of his own uncomplaining and stouter courage, showed him a sight which sent his faltering hope skyward and started his heart bounding.
For there below them lay the vast and endless background of the sea, throwing every intervening detail of the landscape into insignificance.
There it was, steel blue in the brightening sunlight and glimmering here and there in changing white, where perhaps some treacherous rock or bar lay just submerged.

And upon it, looking infinitesimal in the limitless expanse, was something solid with a column of black smoke rising and winding away from it and dissolving in the clear, morning air.
"There you are!" said Tom, patting _Uncle Sam_ patronizingly in a swift change of mood.