"Darren called, he's broke down up the road", Boone informed me before we left the checkpoint.
We hadn't heard from Darren in about five hours, so I was hoping that meant he was well out in front of us, and having a trouble free run to Great Bend. "What'd he say the problem was?"
"Said all the lights went really super bright, then went out, so I guess we'll figure it out when we find him."

We found him, only about ten miles up the road, and it took quite a while to diagnose the problem in the pitch dark, especially since Darren wasn't going to admit to any wrong doing. First things first, he had melted down battery #2 with his use of the full field toggle switch. In fact, the toggle switch itself was melted, and the headlight and taillight bulbs were all blown!
Apparently Darren found the time to get his tires balanced, but replacing Boone's battery, wasn't on his list of priorities, so now Boone didn't have a second one to loan him. The Belvedere has a single battery. The Gremlin has twin batteries, but they built the battery boxes behind the wheel tubs, installed the batteries, and then riveted in all the interior aluminum above them, so it would be major surgery to retrieve one of them. That left everyone looking at me and the Valiant.
"I'm not loaning him a battery as long as that stupid alternator is hooked up...period!" I named my terms
Dale looked at Darren, and he nodded, "Alright, we'll disconnect it, and we'll just have to stop and charge it when it runs down."
We managed to get the truck running once again, and decided to put him in between us and limp to the next town to attempt repairing the lights. We headed out at Midnight, so most of us had been awake for 24 hours at this point, since we left the motel in Topeka.