Free Air
by Sinclair Lewis · English · Gutenberg #26732 · 488,206 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Free Air
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Release date: September 30, 2008 [eBook #26732]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREE AIR ***
Produced by K Nordquist, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
FREE AIR
BY
SINCLAIR LEWIS
AUTHOR OF
THE JOB, ETC.
[Device]
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I MISS BOLTWOOD OF BROOKLYN IS LOST IN THE MUD 3
II CLAIRE ESCAPES FROM RESPECTABILITY 10
III A YOUNG MAN IN A RAINCOAT 21
IV A ROOM WITHOUT 36
V RELEASE BRAKES--SHIFT TO THIRD 49
VI THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS 66
VII THE GREAT AMERICAN FRYING PAN 74
VIII THE DISCOVERY OF CANNED SHRIMPS AND HESPERIDES 85
IX THE MAN WITH AGATE EYES 101
X THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE HILLSIDE ROAD 112
XI SAGEBRUSH TOURISTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY 119
XII THE WONDERS OF NATURE WITH ALL MODERN IMPROVEMENTS 129
XIII ADVENTURERS BY FIRELIGHT 138
XIV THE BEAST OF THE CORRAL 149
XV THE BLACK DAY OF THE VOYAGE 154
XVI THE SPECTACLES OF AUTHORITY 165
XVII THE VAGABOND IN GREEN 176
XVIII THE FALLACY OF ROMANCE 188
XIX THE NIGHT OF ENDLESS PINES 194
XX THE FREE WOMAN 205
XXI THE MINE OF LOST SOULS 219
XXII ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD 228
XXIII THE GRAEL IN A BACK YARD IN YAKIMA 237
XXIV HER OWN PEOPLE 242
XXV THE ABYSSINIAN PRINCE 254
XXVI A CLASS IN ENGINEERING AND OMELETS 270
XXVII THE VICIOUSNESS OF NICE THINGS 279
XXVIII THE MORNING COAT OF MR. HUDSON B. RIGGS 290
XXIX THE ENEMY LOVE 300
XXX THE VIRTUOUS PLOTTERS 307
XXXI THE KITCHEN INTIMATE 310
XXXII THE CORNFIELD ARISTOCRAT 331
XXXIII TOOTH-MUG TEA 345
XXXIV THE BEGINNING OF A STORY 361
FREE AIR
FREE AIR
CHAPTER I
MISS BOLTWOOD OF BROOKLYN IS LOST IN THE MUD
When the windshield was closed it became so filmed with rain that Claire
fancied she was piloting a drowned car in dim spaces under the sea. When
it was open, drops jabbed into her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She was
excited and thoroughly miserable. She realized that these Minnesota
country roads had no respect for her polite experience on Long Island
parkways. She felt like a woman, not like a driver.
But the Gomez-Dep roadster had seventy horsepower, and sang songs. Since
she had left Minneapolis nothing had passed her. Back yonder a truck had
tried to crowd her, and she had dropped into a ditch, climbed a bank,
returned to the road, and after that the truck was not. Now she was
regarding a view more splendid than mountains above a garden by the
sea--a stretch of good road. To her passenger, her father, Claire
chanted:
"Heavenly! There's some gravel. We can make time. We'll hustle on to the
next town and get dry."
"Yes. But don't mind me. You're doing very well," her father sighed.
Instantly, the dismay of it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch
of gravel. The road ahead was a wet black smear, criss-crossed with
ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo--which is mud mixed
with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered
caramels. When cattle get into gumbo, the farmers send for the
stump-dynamite and try blasting.
It was her first really bad stretch of road. She was frightened. Then
she was too appallingly busy to be frightened, or to be Miss Claire
Boltwood, or to comfort her uneasy father. She had to drive. Her frail
graceful arms put into it a vicious vigor that was genius.
When the wheels struck the slime, they slid, they wallowed. The car
skidded. It was terrifyingly out of control. It began majestically to
turn toward the ditch. She fought the steering wheel as though she were
shadow-boxing, but the car kept contemptuously staggering till it was
sideways, straight across the road. Somehow, it was back again, eating
into a rut, going ahead. She didn't know how she had done it, but she
had got it back. She longed to take time to retrace her own cleverness
in steering. She didn't. She kept going.
The car backfired, slowed. She yanked the gear from third into first.
She sped up. The motor ran like a terrified pounding heart, while the
car crept on by inches through filthy mud that stretched ahead of her
without relief.
She was battling to hold the car in the principal rut. She snatched the
windshield open, and concentrated on that left rut. She felt that she
was keeping the wheel from climbing those high sides of the rut, those
six-inch walls of mud, sparkling with tiny grits. Her mind snarled at
her arms, "Let the ruts do the steering. You're just fighting against
them." It worked. Once she let the wheels alone they comfortably
followed the furrows, and for three seconds she had that delightful
belief of every motorist after every mishap, "Now that this particular
disagreeableness is over, I'll never, never have any trouble again!"
But suppose the engine overheated, ran out of water? Anxiety twanged at
her nerves. And the deep distinctive ruts were changing to a complex
pattern, like the rails in a city switchyard. She picked out the track
of the one motor car that had been through here recently. It was marked
with the swastika tread of the rear tires. That track was her friend;
she knew and loved the driver of a car she had never seen in her life.
She was very tired. She wondered if she might not stop for a moment.
Then she came to an upslope. The car faltered; felt indecisive beneath
her. She jabbed down the accelerator. Her hands pushed at the steering
wheel as though she were pushing the car. The engine picked up, sulkily
kept going. To the eye, there was merely a rise in the rolling ground,
but to her anxiety it was a mountain up which she--not the engine, but
herself--pulled this bulky mass, till she had reached the top, and was
safe again--for a second. Still there was no visible end of the mud.
In alarm she thought, "How long does it last? I can't keep this up.
I--Oh!"
The guiding tread of the previous car was suddenly lost in a mass of
heaving, bubble-scattered mud, like a batter of black dough. She fairly
picked up the car, and flung it into that welter, through it, and back
into the reappearing swastika-marked trail.
Her father spoke: "You're biting your lips. They'll bleed, if you don't
look out. Better stop and rest."
"Can't! No bottom to this mud. Once stop and lose momentum--stuck for
keeps!"
She had ten more minutes of it before she reached a combination of
bridge and culvert, with a plank platform above a big tile drain. With
this solid plank bottom, she could stop. Silence came roaring down as
she turned the switch. The bubbling water in the radiator steamed about
the cap. Claire was conscious of tautness of the cords of her neck in
front; of a pain at the base of her brain. Her father glanced at her
curiously. "I must be a wreck. I'm sure my hair is frightful," she
thought, but forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually
pale. In the tumult of activity he had been betrayed into letting the
old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. "Must get on," she
determined.
Claire was dainty of habit. She detested untwisted hair, ripped gloves,
muddy shoes. Hesitant as a cat by a puddle, she stepped down on the
bridge. Even on these planks, the mud was three inches thick. It
squidged about her low, spatted shoes. "Eeh!" she squeaked.
She tiptoed to the tool-box and took out a folding canvas bucket. She
edged down to the trickling stream below. She was miserably conscious of
a pastoral scene all gone to mildew--cows beneath willows by the creek,
milkweeds dripping, dried mullein weed stalks no longer dry. The bank of
the stream was so slippery that she shot down two feet, and nearly went
sprawling. Her knee did touch the bank, and the skirt of her gray
sports-suit showed a smear of yellow earth.
In less than two miles the racing motor had used up so much water that
she had to make four trips to the creek before she had filled the
radiator. When she had climbed back on the running-board she glared down
at spats and shoes turned into gray lumps. She was not tearful. She was
angry.
"Idiot! Ought to have put on my rubbers. Well--too late now," she
observed, as she started the engine.
She again followed the swastika tread. To avoid a hole in the road
ahead, the unknown driver had swung over to the side of the road, and
taken to the intensely black earth of the edge of an unfenced cornfield.
Flashing at Claire came the sight of a deep, water-filled hole,
scattered straw and brush, debris of a battlefield, which made her
gaspingly realize that her swastikaed leader had been stuck and--
And instantly her own car was stuck.
She had had to put the car at that hole. It dropped, far down, and it
stayed down. The engine stalled. She started it, but the back wheels
spun merrily round and round, without traction. She did not make one
inch. When she again killed the blatting motor, she let it stay dead.
She peered at her father.
He was not a father, just now, but a passenger trying not to irritate
the driver. He smiled in a waxy way, and said, "Hard luck! Well, you did
the best you could. The other hole, there in the road, would have been
just as bad. You're a fine driver, dolly."
Her smile was warm and real. "No. I'm a fool. You told me to put on
chains. I didn't. I deserve it."
"Well, anyway, most men would be cussing. You acquire merit by not
beating me. I believe that's done, in moments like this. If you'd like,
I'll get out and crawl around in the mud, and play turtle for you."
"No. I'm quite all right. I did feel frightfully strong-minded as long
as there was any use of it. It kept me going. But now I might just as
well be cheerful, because we're stuck, and we're probably going to stay
stuck for the rest of this care-free summer day."
The weariness of the long strain caught her, all at once. She slipped
forward, sat huddled, her knees crossed under the edge of the steering
wheel, her hands falling beside her, one of them making a faint brushing
sound as it slid down the upholstery. Her eyes closed; as her head
drooped farther, she fancied she could hear the vertebrae click in her
tense neck.
Her father was silent, a misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked
the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled
desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled
musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy
drowse. She felt that she could never drive again.
CHAPTER II
CLAIRE ESCAPES FROM RESPECTABILITY
Claire Boltwood lived on the Heights, Brooklyn. Persons from New York
and other parts of the Middlewest have been known to believe that
Brooklyn is somehow humorous. In newspaper jokes and vaudeville it is so
presented that people who are willing to take their philosophy from
those sources believe that the leading citizens of Brooklyn are all
deacons, undertakers, and obstetricians. The fact is that North
Washington Square, at its reddest and whitest and fanlightedest,
Gramercy Park at its most ivied, are not so aristocratic as the section
of Brooklyn called the Heights. Here preached Henry Ward Beecher. Here,
in mansions like mausoleums, on the ridge above docks where the good
ships came sailing in from Sourabaya and Singapore, ruled the lords of a
thousand sails. And still is it a place of wealth too solid to emulate
the nimble self-advertising of Fifth Avenue. Here dwell the
fifth-generation possessors of blocks of foundries and shipyards. Here,
in a big brick house of much dignity, much ugliness, and much
conservatory, lived Claire Boltwood, with her widower father.
Henry B. Boltwood was vice-president of a firm dealing in railway
supplies. He was neither wealthy nor at all poor. Every summer, despite
Claire's delicate hints, they took the same cottage on the Jersey Coast,
and Mr. Boltwood came down for Sunday. Claire had gone to a good school
out of Philadelphia, on the Main Line. She was used to gracious leisure,
attractive uselessness, nut-center chocolates, and a certain wonder as
to why she was alive.
She wanted to travel, but her father could not get away. He consistently
spent his days in overworking, and his evenings in wishing he hadn't
overworked. He was attractive, fresh, pink-cheeked, white-mustached, and
nerve-twitching with years of detail.
Claire's ambition had once been babies and a solid husband, but as
various young males of the species appeared before her, sang their
mating songs and preened their newly dry-cleaned plumage, she found that
the trouble with solid young men was that they were solid. Though she
liked to dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand
the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at
listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in
discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif.
It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a
good taste in ties, and an income of eight thousand.
The only man who disturbed her was Geoffrey Saxton, known throughout the
interwoven sets of Brooklyn Heights as "Jeff." Jeff Saxton was
thirty-nine to Claire's twenty-three. He was clean and busy; he had no
signs of vice or humor. Especially for Jeff must have been invented the
symbolic morning coat, the unwrinkable gray trousers, and the moral
rimless spectacles. He was a graduate of a nice college, and he had a
nice tenor and a nice family and nice hands and he was nicely successful
in New York copper dealing. When he was asked questions by people who
were impertinent, clever, or poor, Jeff looked them over coldly before
he answered, and often they felt so uncomfortable that he didn't have to
answer.
The boys of Claire's own age, not long out of Yale and Princeton, doing
well in business and jumping for their evening clothes daily at
six-thirty, light o' loves and admirers of athletic heroes, these lads
Claire found pleasant, but hard to tell apart. She didn't have to tell
Jeff Saxton apart. He did his own telling. Jeff called--not too often.
He sang--not too sentimentally. He took her father and herself to the
theater--not too lavishly. He told Claire--in a voice not too
serious--that she was his helmed Athena, his rose of all the world. He
informed her of his substantial position--not too obviously. And he was
so everlastingly, firmly, quietly, politely, immovably always there.
She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat
of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.
Then her father got the nervous prostration he had richly earned. The
doctor ordered rest. Claire took him in charge. He didn't want to
travel. Certainly he didn't want the shore or the Adirondacks. As there
was a branch of his company in Minneapolis, she lured him that far away.
Being rootedly of Brooklyn Heights, Claire didn't know much about the
West. She thought that Milwaukee was the capital of Minnesota. She was
not so uninformed as some of her friends, however. She had heard that in
Dakota wheat was to be viewed in vast tracts--maybe a hundred acres.
Mr. Boltwood could not be coaxed to play with the people to whom his
Minneapolis representative introduced him. He was overworking again, and
perfectly happy. He was hoping to find something wrong with the branch
house. Claire tried to tempt him out to the lakes. She failed. His
nerve-fuse burnt out the second time, with much fireworks.
Claire had often managed her circle of girls, but it had never occurred
to her to manage her executive father save by indirect and pretty
teasing. Now, in conspiracy with the doctor, she bullied her father. He
saw gray death waiting as alternative, and he was meek. He agreed to
everything. He consented to drive with her across two thousand miles of
plains and mountains to Seattle, to drop in for a call on their
cousins, the Eugene Gilsons.
Back East they had a chauffeur and two cars--the limousine, and the
Gomez-Deperdussin roadster, Claire's beloved. It would, she believed, be
more of a change from everything that might whisper to Mr. Boltwood of
the control of men, not to take a chauffeur. Her father never drove, but
she could, she insisted. His easy agreeing was pathetic. He watched her
with spaniel eyes. They had the Gomez roadster shipped to them from New
York.
On a July morning, they started out of Minneapolis in a mist, and as it
has been hinted, they stopped sixty miles northward, in a rain, also in
much gumbo. Apparently their nearest approach to the Pacific Ocean would
be this oceanically moist edge of a cornfield, between Schoenstrom and
Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
* * * * *
Claire roused from her damp doze and sighed, "Well, I must get busy and
get the car out of this."
"Don't you think you'd better get somebody to help us?"
"But get who?"
"Whom!"
"No! It's just 'who,' when you're in the mud. No. One of the good things
about an adventure like this is that I must do things for myself. I've
always had people to do things for me. Maids and nice teachers and you,
old darling! I suppose it's made me soft. Soft--I would like a soft
davenport and a novel and a pound of almond-brittle, and get all sick,
and not feel so beastly virile as I do just now. But----"
She turned up the collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed
out--the muscles of her back racking--and examined the state of the rear
wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in
solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too
late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered
from the narratives of motoring friends that brush in mud gave a firmer
surface for the wheels to climb upon.
She also remembered how jolly and agreeably heroic the accounts of their
mishaps had sounded--a week after they were over.
She waded down the road toward an old wood-lot. At first she tried to
keep dry, but she gave it up, and there was pleasure in being defiantly
dirty. She tramped straight through puddles; she wallowed in mud. In the
wood-lot was long grass which soaked her stockings till her ankles felt
itchy. Claire had never expected to be so very intimate with a
brush-pile. She became so. As though she were a pioneer woman who had
been toiling here for years, she came to know the brush stick by
stick--the long valuable branch that she could never quite get out from
under the others; the thorny bough that pricked her hands every time she
tried to reach the curious bundle of switches.
Seven trips she made, carrying armfuls of twigs and solemnly dragging
large boughs behind her. She patted them down in front of all four
wheels. Her crisp hands looked like the paws of a three-year-old boy
making a mud fort. Her nails hurt from the mud wedged beneath them. Her
mud-caked shoes were heavy to lift. It was with exquisite self-approval
that she sat on the running-board, scraped a car-load of lignite off her
soles, climbed back into the car, punched the starter.
The car stirred, crept forward one inch, and settled back--one inch. The
second time it heaved encouragingly but did not make quite so much
headway. Then Claire did sob.
She rubbed her cheek against the comfortable, rough, heather-smelling
shoulder of her father's coat, while he patted her and smiled, "Good
girl! I better get out and help."
She sat straight, shook her head. "Nope. I'll do it. And I'm not going
to insist on being heroic any longer. I'll get a farmer to pull us out."
As she let herself down into the ooze, she reflected that all farmers
have hearts of gold, anatomical phenomena never found among the snobs
and hirelings of New York. The nearest heart of gold was presumably
beating warmly in the house a quarter of a mile ahead.
She came up a muddy lane to a muddy farmyard, with a muddy cur yapping
at her wet legs, and geese hissing in a pool of purest mud serene. The
house was small and rather old. It may have been painted once. The barn
was large and new. It had been painted very much, and in a blinding red
with white trimmings. There was no brass plate on the house, but on the
barn, in huge white letters, was the legend, "Adolph Zolzac, 1913."
She climbed by log steps to a narrow frame back porch littered with
parts of a broken cream-separator. She told herself that she was simple
and friendly in going to the back door instead of the front, and it was
with gaiety that she knocked on the ill-jointed screen door, which
flapped dismally in response.
"_Ja?_" from within.
She rapped again.
"_Hinein!_"
She opened the door on a kitchen, the highlight of which was a table
heaped with dishes of dumplings and salt pork. A shirt-sleeved man, all
covered with mustache and calm, sat by the table, and he kept right on
sitting as he inquired:
"Vell?"
"My car--my automobile--has been stuck in the mud. A bad driver, I'm
afraid! I wonder if you would be so good as to----"
"I usually get t'ree dollars, but I dunno as I vant to do it for less
than four. Today I ain'd feelin' very goot," grumbled the
golden-hearted.
Claire was aware that a woman whom she had not noticed--so much smaller
than the dumplings, so much less vigorous than the salt pork was
she--was speaking: "_Aber_, papa, dot's a shame you sharge de poor young
lady dot, when she drive by _sei_ self. Vot she t'ink of de Sherman
people?"
The farmer merely grunted. To Claire, "Yuh, four dollars. Dot's what I
usually charge sometimes."
"Usually? Do you mean to say that you leave that hole there in the road
right along--that people keep on trying to avoid it and get stuck as I
was? Oh! If I were an official----"
"Vell, I dunno, I don't guess I run my place to suit you smart
alecks----"
"Papa! How you talk on the young lady! Make shame!"
"--from the city. If you don't like it, you stay _bei_ Mineapolis! I
haul you out for t'ree dollars and a half. Everybody pay dot. Last mont'
I make forty-five dollars. They vos all glad to pay. They say I help
them fine. I don't see vot you're kickin' about! Oh, these vimmins!"
"It's blackmail! I wouldn't pay it, if it weren't for my father sitting
waiting out there. But--go ahead. Hurry!"
She sat tapping her toe while Zolzac completed the stertorous task of
hogging the dumplings, then stretched, yawned, scratched, and covered
his merely dirty garments with overalls that were apparently woven of
processed mud. When he had gone to the barn for his team, his wife came
to Claire. On her drained face were the easy tears of the slave women.
"Oh, miss, I don't know vot I should do. My boys go on the public
school, and they speak American just so goot as you. Oh, I vant man lets
me luff America. But papa he says it is an _Unsinn_; you got the money,
he says, nobody should care if you are American or Old Country people. I
should vish I could ride once in an automobile! But--I am so 'shamed, so
'shamed that I must sit and see my _Mann_ make this. Forty years I been
married to him, and pretty soon I die----"
Claire patted her hand. There was nothing to say to tragedy that had
outlived hope.
Adolph Zolzac clumped out to the highroad behind his vast,
rolling-flanked horses--so much cleaner and better fed than his wisp of
a wife. Claire followed him, and in her heart she committed murder and
was glad of it. While Mr. Boltwood looked out with mild wonder at
Claire's new friend, Zolzac hitched his team to the axle. It did not
seem possible that two horses could pull out the car where seventy
horsepower had fainted. But, easily, yawning and thinking about dinner,
the horses drew the wheels up on the mud-bank, out of the hole and----
The harness broke, with a flying mess of straps and rope, and the car
plumped with perfect exactness back into its bed.
CHAPTER III
A YOUNG MAN IN A RAINCOAT
"Huh! Such an auto! Look, it break my harness a'ready! Two dollar that
cost you to mend it. De auto iss too heavy!" stormed Zolzac.
"All right! All right! Only for heaven's sake--go get another harness!"
Claire shrieked.
"Fife-fifty dot will be, in all." Zolzac grinned.
Claire was standing in front of him. She was thinking of other drivers,
poor people, in old cars, who had been at the mercy of this
golden-hearted one. She stared past him, in the direction from which she
had come. Another motor was in sight.
It was a tin beetle of a car; that agile, cheerful, rut-jumping model
known as a "bug"; with a home-tacked, home-painted tin cowl and tail
covering the stripped chassis of a little cheap Teal car. The lone
driver wore an old black raincoat with an atrocious corduroy collar, and
a new plaid cap in the Harry Lauder tartan. The bug skipped through mud
where the Boltwoods' Gomez had slogged and rolled. Its pilot drove up
behind her car, and leaped out. He trotted forward to Claire and Zolzac.
His eyes were twenty-seven or eight, but his pink cheeks were twenty,
and when he smiled--shyly, radiantly--he was no age at all, but eternal
boy. Claire had a blurred impression that she had seen him before, some
place along the road.
"Stuck?" he inquired, not very intelligently. "How much is Adolph
charging you?"
"He wants three-fifty, and his harness broke, and he wants two
dollars----"
"Oh! So he's still working that old gag! I've heard all about Adolph. He
keeps that harness for pulling out cars, and it always busts. The last
time, though, he only charged six bits to get it mended. Now let me
reason with him."
The young man turned with vicious quickness, and for the first time
Claire heard pidgin German--German as it is spoken between Americans who
have never learned it, and Germans who have forgotten it:
"_Schon sex_ hundred times _Ich hoere_ all about the way you been doing
autos, Zolzac, you _verfluchter Schweinhund_, and I'll set the sheriff
on you----"
"Dot ain'd true, maybe _einmal die Woche kommt_ somebody and _Ich muss
die Arbeit immer lassen und in die Regen ausgehen, und seh' mal_ how
_die_ boots _sint mit_ mud covered, two dollars it don't pay for _die_
boots----"
"Now that's enough-plenty out of you, _seien die_ boots _verdammt_, and
_mach' dass du fort gehst_--muddy boots, hell!--put _mal ein_ egg in
_die_ boots and beat it, _verleicht_ maybe I'll by golly arrest you
myself, _weiss du_! I'm a special deputy sheriff."
The young man stood stockily. He seemed to swell as his somewhat muddy
hand was shaken directly at, under, and about the circumference of,
Adolph Zolzac's hairy nose. The farmer was stronger, but he retreated.
He took up the reins. He whined, "Don't I get nothing I break de
harness?"
"Sure. You get ten--years! And you get out!"
From thirty yards up the road, Zolzac flung back, "You t'ink you're
pretty damn smart!" That was his last serious reprisal.
Clumsily, as one not used to it, the young man lifted his cap to Claire,
showing straight, wiry, rope-colored hair, brushed straight back from a
rather fine forehead. "Gee, I was sorry to have to swear and holler like
that, but it's all Adolph understands. Please don't think there's many
of the folks around here like him. They say he's the meanest man in the
county."
"I'm immensely grateful to you, but--do you know much about motors? How
can I get out of this mud?"
She was surprised to see the youngster blush. His clear skin flooded.
His engaging smile came again, and he hesitated, "Let me pull you out."
She looked from her hulking car to his mechanical flea.
He answered the look: "I can do it all right. I'm used to the
gumbo--regular mud-hen. Just add my power to yours. Have you a
tow-rope?"
"No. I never thought of bringing one."
"I'll get mine."
She walked with him back toward his bug. It lacked not only top and
side-curtains, but even windshield and running-board. It was a toy--a
card-board box on toothpick axles. Strapped to the bulging back was a
wicker suitcase partly covered by tarpaulin. From the seat peered a
little furry face.
"A cat?" she exclaimed, as he came up with a wire rope, extracted from
the tin back.
"Yes. She's the captain of the boat. I'm just the engineer."
"What is her name?"
Before he answered the young man strode ahead to the front of her car,
Claire obediently trotting after him. He stooped to look at her front
axle. He raised his head, glanced at her, and he was blushing again.
"Her name is Vere de Vere!" he confessed. Then he fled back to his bug.
He drove it in front of the Gomez-Dep. The hole in the road itself was
as deep as the one on the edge of the cornfield, where she was stuck,
but he charged it. She was fascinated by his skill. Where she would for
a tenth of a second have hesitated while choosing the best course, he
hurled the bug straight at the hole, plunged through with sheets of
glassy black water arching on either side, then viciously twisted the
car to the right, to the left, and straight again, as he followed the
tracks with the solidest bottoms.
Strapped above the tiny angle-iron step which replaced his running-board
was an old spade. He dug channels in front of the four wheels of her
car, so that they might go up inclines, instead of pushing against the
straight walls of mud they had thrown up. On these inclines he strewed
the brush she had brought, halting to ask, with head alertly lifted from
his stooped huddle in the mud, "Did you have to get this brush
yourself?"
"Yes. Horrid wet!"
He merely shook his head in commiseration.
He fastened the tow-rope to the rear axle of his car, to the front of
hers. "Now will you be ready to put on all your power as I begin to
pull?" he said casually, rather respectfully.
When the struggling bug had pulled the wire rope taut, she opened the
throttle. The rope trembled. Her car seemed to draw sullenly back. Then
it came out--out--really out, which is the most joyous sensation any
motorist shall ever know. In excitement over actually moving again, as
fast as any healthy young snail, she drove on, on, the young man ahead
grinning back at her. Nor did she stop, nor he, till both cars were
safe on merely thick mud, a quarter of a mile away.
She switched off the power--and suddenly she was in a whirlwind of dizzy
sickening tiredness. Even in her abandonment to exhaustion she noticed
that the young man did not stare at her but, keeping his back to her,
removed the tow-rope, and stowed it away in his bug. She wondered
whether it was tact or yokelish indifference.
Her father spoke for the first time since the Galahad of the tin bug had
come: "How much do you think we ought to give this fellow?"
Now of all the cosmic problems yet unsolved, not cancer nor the future
of poverty are the flustering questions, but these twain: Which is
worse, not to wear evening clothes at a party at which you find every
one else dressed, or to come in evening clothes to a house where, it
proves, they are never worn? And: Which is worse, not to tip when a tip
has been expected; or to tip, when the tip is an insult?
In discomfort of spirit and wetness of ankles Claire shuddered, "Oh
dear, I don't believe he expects us to pay him. He seems like an awfully
independent person. Maybe we'd offend him if we offered----"
"The only reasonable thing to be offended at in this vale of tears is
not being offered money!"
"Just the same---- Oh dear, I'm so tired. But good little Claire will
climb out and be diplomatic."
She pinched her forehead, to hold in her cracking brain, and wabbled out
into new scenes of mud and wetness, but she came up to the young man
with the most rain-washed and careless of smiles. "Won't you come back
and meet my father? He's terribly grateful to you--as I am. And may
we---- You've worked so hard, and about saved our lives. May I pay you
for that labor? We're really much indebted----"
"Oh, it wasn't anything. Tickled to death if I could help you."
He heartily shook hands with her father, and he droned, "Pleased to meet
you, Mr. Uh."
"Boltwood."
"Mr. Boltwood. My name is Milt--Milton Daggett. See you have a New York
license on your car. We don't see but mighty few of those through here.
Glad I could help you."
"Ah yes, Mr. Daggett." Mr. Boltwood was uninterestedly fumbling in his
money pocket. Behind Milt Daggett, Claire shook her head wildly,
rattling her hands as though she were playing castanets. Mr. Boltwood
shrugged. He did not understand. His relations with young men in cheap
raincoats were entirely monetary. They did something for you, and you
paid them--preferably not too much--and they ceased to be. Whereas Milt
Daggett respectfully but stolidly continued to be, and Mr. Henry
Boltwood's own daughter was halting the march of affairs by asking
irrelevant questions:
"Didn't we see you back in--what was that village we came through back
about twelve miles?"
"Schoenstrom?" suggested Milt.
"Yes, I think that was it. Didn't we pass you or something? We stopped
at a garage there, to change a tire."
"I don't think so. I was in town, though, this morning. Say, uh, did you
and your father grab any eats----"
"A----"
"I mean, did you get dinner there?"
"No. I wish we had!"
"Well say, I didn't either, and--I'd be awfully glad if you folks would
have something to eat with me now."
Claire tried to give him a smile, but the best she could do was to lend
him one. She could not associate interesting food with Milt and his
mud-slobbered, tin-covered, dun-painted Teal bug. He seemed satisfied
with her dubious grimace. By his suggestion they drove ahead to a spot
where the cars could be parked on firm grass beneath oaks. On the way,
Mr. Boltwood lifted his voice in dismay. His touch of nervous
prostration had not made him queer or violent; he retained a touching
faith in good food.
"We might find some good little hotel and have some chops and just some
mushrooms and peas," insisted the man from Brooklyn Heights.
"Oh, I don't suppose the country hotels are really so awfully good," she
speculated. "And look--that nice funny boy. We couldn't hurt his
feelings. He's having so much fun out of being a Good Samaritan."
From the mysterious rounded back of his car Milt Daggett drew a tiny
stove, to be heated by a can of solidified alcohol, a frying pan that
was rather large for dolls but rather small for square-fingered hands, a
jar of bacon, eggs in a bag, a coffee pot, a can of condensed milk, and
a litter of unsorted tin plates and china cups. While, by his request,
Claire scoured the plates and cups, he made bacon and eggs and coffee,
the little stove in the bottom of his car sheltered by the cook's
bending over it. The smell of food made Claire forgiving toward the fact
that she was wet through; that the rain continued to drizzle down her
neck.
He lifted his hand and demanded, "Take your shoes off!"
"Uh?"
He gulped. He stammered, "I mean--I mean your shoes are soaked through.
If you'll sit in the car, I'll put your shoes up by the engine. It's
pretty well heated from racing it in the mud. You can get your stockings
dry under the cowl."
She was amused by the elaborateness with which he didn't glance at her
while she took off her low shoes and slipped her quite too thin black
stockings under the protecting tin cowl. She reflected, "He has such a
nice, awkward gentleness. But such bad taste! They're really quite good
ankles. Apparently ankles are not done, in Teal bug circles. His sisters
don't even have limbs. But do fairies have sisters? He is a fairy. When
I'm out of the mud he'll turn his raincoat into a pair of lordly white
wings, and vanish. But what will become of the cat?"
Thus her tired brain, like a squirrel in a revolving cage, while she sat
primly and scraped at a clot of rust on a tin plate and watched him put
on the bacon and eggs. Wondering if cats were used for this purpose in
the Daggett family, she put soaked, unhappy Vere de Vere on her feet, to
her own great comfort and the cat's delight. It was an open car, and the
rain still rained, and a strange young man was a foot from her tending
the not very crackly fire, but rarely had Claire felt so domestic.
Milt was apparently struggling to say something. After several bobs of
his head he ventured, "You're so wet! I'd like for you to take my
raincoat."
"No! Really! I'm already soaked through. You keep dry."
He was unhappy about it. He plucked at a button of the coat. She turned
him from the subject. "I hope Lady Vere de Vere is getting warm, too."
"Seems to be. She's kind of demanding. She wanted a little car of her
own, but I didn't think she could keep up with me, not on a long hike."
"A little car? With her paws on the tiny wheel? Oh--sweet! Are you going
far, Mr. Daggett?"
"Yes, quite a ways. To Seattle, Washington."
"Oh, really? Extraordinary. We're going there, too."
"Honest? You driving all the way? Oh, no, of course your father----"
"No, he doesn't drive. By the way, I hope he isn't too miserable back
there."
"I'll be darned. Both of us going to Seattle. That's what they call a
coincidence, isn't it! Hope I'll see you on the road, some time. But I
don't suppose I will. Once you're out of the mud, your Gomez will simply
lose my Teal."
"Not necessarily. You're the better driver. And I shall take it easy.
Are you going to stay long in Seattle?" It was not merely a polite
dinner-payment question. She wondered; she could not place this
fresh-cheeked, unworldly young man so far from his home.
"Why, I kind of hope---- Government railroad, Alaska. I'm going to try
to get in on that, somehow. I've never been out of Minnesota in my life,
but there's couple mountains and oceans and things I thought I'd like
to see, so I just put my suitcase and Vere de Vere in the machine, and
started out. I burn distillate instead of gas, so it doesn't cost much.
If I ever happen to have five whole dollars, why, I might go on to
Japan!"
"That would be jolly."
"Though I s'pose I'd have to eat--what is it?--pickled fish? There's a
woman from near my town went to the Orient as a missionary. From what
she says, I guess all you need in Japan to make a house is a bottle of
mucilage and a couple of old newspapers and some two-by-fours. And you
can have the house on a purple mountain, with cherry trees down below,
and----" He put his clenched hand to his lips. His head was bowed. "And
the ocean! Lord! The ocean! And we'll see it at Seattle. Bay, anyway.
And steamers there--just come from India! Huh! Getting pretty darn
poetic here! Eggs are done."
The young man did not again wander into visions. He was all briskness as
he served her bacon and eggs, took a plate of them to Mr. Boltwood in
the Gomez, gouged into his own. Having herself scoured the tin plates,
Claire was not repulsed by their naked tinniness; and the coffee in the
broken-handled china cup was tolerable. Milt drank from the top of a
vacuum bottle. He was silent. Immediately after the lunch he stowed the
things away. Claire expected a drawn-out, tact-demanding farewell, but
he climbed into his bug, said "Good-by, Miss Boltwood. Good luck!" and
was gone.
The rainy road was bleakly empty without him.
It did not seem possible that Claire's body could be nagged into going
on any longer. Her muscles were relaxed, her nerves frayed. But the
moment the Gomez started, she discovered that magic change which every
long-distance motorist knows. Instantly she was alert, seemingly able to
drive forever. The pilot's instinct ruled her; gave her tireless eyes
and sturdy hands. Surely she had never been weary; never would be, so
long as it was hers to keep the car going.
She had driven perhaps six miles when she reached a hamlet called St.
Klopstock. On the bedraggled mud-and-shanty main street a man was
loading crushed rock into a truck. By him was a large person in a
prosperous raincoat, who stepped out, held up his hand. Claire stopped.
"You the young lady that got stuck in that hole by Adolph Zolzac's?"
"Yes. And Mr. Zolzac wasn't very nice about it."
"He's going to be just elegant about it, now, and there ain't going to
be any more hole. I think Adolph has been keeping it muddy--throwing in
soft dirt--and he made a good and plenty lot out of pulling out
tourists. Bill and I are going down right now and fill it up with stone.
Milt Daggett come through here--he's got a nerve, that fellow, but I
did have to laugh--he says to me, 'Barney----' This was just now. He
hasn't more than just drove out of town. He said to me, 'Barney,' he
says, 'you're the richest man in this township, and the banker, and you
got a big car y'self, and you think you're one whale of a political
boss,' he says, 'and yet you let that Zolzac maintain a private ocean,
against the peace and damn horrible inconvenience of the Commonwealth of
Minnesota----' He's got a great line of talk, that fellow. He told me
how you got stuck--made me so ashamed--I been to New York myself--and
right away I got Bill, and we're going down and hold a donation and
surprise party on Adolph and fill that hole."
"But won't Adolph dig it out again?"
The banker was puffy, but his eyes were of stone. From the truck he took
a shotgun. He drawled, "In that case, the surprise party will include an
elegant wake."
"But how did---- Who is this extraordinary Milt Daggett?"
"Him? Oh, nobody 'specially. He's just a fellow down here at
Schoenstrom. But we all know him. Goes to all the dances, thirty miles
around. Thing about him is: if he sees something wrong, he picks out
some poor fellow like me, and says what he thinks."
Claire drove on. She was aware that she was looking for Milt's bug. It
was not in sight.
"Father," she exclaimed, "do you realize that this lad didn't tell us he
was going to have the hole filled? Just did it. He frightens me. I'm
afraid that when we reach Gopher Prairie for the night, we'll find he
has engaged for us the suite that Prince Collars and Cuffs once slept
in."
"Hhhhmm," yawned her father.
"Curious young man. He said, 'Pleased to meet you.'"
"Huuuuhhm! Fresh air makes me so sleepy."
"And---- Fooled you! Got through that mudhole, anyway! And he said----
Look! Fields stretch out so here, and not a tree except the
willow-groves round those farmhouses. And he said 'Gee' so many times,
and 'dinner' for the noon meal. And his nails---- No, I suppose he
really is just a farm youngster."
Mr. Boltwood did not answer. His machine-finish smile indicated an
enormous lack of interest in young men in Teal bugs.
CHAPTER IV
A ROOM WITHOUT
Gopher Prairie has all of five thousand people. Its commercial club
asserts that it has at least a thousand more population and an
infinitely better band than the ridiculously envious neighboring town of
Joralemon. But there were few signs that a suite had been engaged for
the Boltwoods, or that Prince Collars and Cuffs had on his royal tour of
America spent much time in Gopher Prairie. Claire reached it somewhat
before seven. She gaped at it in a hazy way. Though this was her first
prairie town for a considerable stay, she could not pump up interest.
The state of mind of the touring motorist entering a strange place at
night is as peculiar and definite as that of a prospector. It is
compounded of gratitude at having got safely in; of perception of a new
town, yet with all eagerness about new things dulled by weariness; of
hope that there is going to be a good hotel, but small expectation--and
absolutely no probability--that there really will be one.
Claire had only a blotched impression of peaked wooden buildings and
squatty brick stores with faded awnings; of a red grain elevator and a
crouching station and a lumberyard; then of the hopelessly muddy road
leading on again into the country. She felt that if she didn't stop at
once, she would miss the town entirely. The driving-instinct sustained
her, made her take corners sharply, spot a garage, send the Gomez
whirling in on the cement floor.
The garage attendant looked at her and yawned.
"Where do you want the car?" Claire asked sharply.
"Oh, stick it in that stall," grunted the man, and turned his back.
Claire glowered at him. She thought of a good line about rudeness.
But--oh, she was too tired to fuss. She tried to run the car into the
empty stall, which was not a stall, but a space, like a missing tooth,
between two cars, and so narrow that she was afraid of crumpling the
lordly fenders of the Gomez. She ran down the floor, returned with a
flourish, thought she was going to back straight into the stall--and
found she wasn't. While her nerves shrieked, and it did not seem
possible that she could change gears, she managed to get the Gomez
behind a truck and side-on to the stall.
"Go forward again, and cramp your wheel--sharp!" ordered the garage man.
Claire wanted to outline what she thought of him, but she merely
demanded, "Will you kindly drive it in?"
"Why, sure. You bet," said the man casually. His readiness ruined her
inspired fury. She was somewhat disappointed.
As she climbed out of the car and put a hand on the smart bags strapped
on a running-board, the accumulated weariness struck her in a shock. She
could have driven on for hours, but the instant the car was safe for the
night, she went to pieces. Her ears rang, her eyes were soaked in fire,
her mouth was dry, the back of her neck pinched. It was her father who
took the lead as they rambled to the one tolerable hotel in the town.
In the hotel Claire was conscious of the ugliness of the poison-green
walls and brass cuspidors and insurance calendars and bare floor of the
office; conscious of the interesting scientific fact that all air had
been replaced by the essence of cigar smoke and cooking cabbage; of the
stares of the traveling men lounging in bored lines; and of the lack of
welcome on the part of the night clerk, an oldish, bleached man with
whiskers instead of a collar.
She tried to be important: "Two rooms with bath, please."
The bleached man stared at her, and shoved forward the register and a
pen clotted with ink. She signed. He took the bags, led the way to the
stairs. Anxiously she asked, "Both rooms are with bath?"
From the second step the night clerk looked down at her as though she
were a specimen that ought to be pinned on the corks at once, and he
said loudly, "No, ma'am. Neither of 'em. Got no rooms vacant with bawth,
or bath either! Not but what we got 'em in the house. This is an
up-to-date place. But one of 'm's took, and the other has kind of been
out of order, the last three-four months."
From the audience of drummers below, a delicate giggle.
Claire was too angry to answer. And too tired. When, after miles of
stairs, leagues of stuffy hall, she reached her coop, with its iron bed
so loose-jointed that it rattled to a breath, its bureau with a list to
port, and its anemic rocking-chair, she dropped on the bed, panting, her
eyes closed but still brimming with fire. It did not seem that she could
ever move again. She felt chloroformed. She couldn't even coax herself
off the bed, to see if her father was any better off in the next room.
She was certain that she was not going to drive to Seattle. She wasn't
going to drive anywhere! She was going to freight the car back to
Minneapolis, and herself go back by train--Pullman!--drawing-room!
But for the thought of her father she would have fallen asleep, in her
drenched tweeds. When she did force the energy to rise, she had to
support herself by the bureau, by the foot of the bed, as she moved
about the room, hanging up the wet suit, rubbing herself with a slippery
towel, putting on a dark silk frock and pumps. She found her father
sitting motionless in his room, staring at the wall. She made herself
laugh at him for his gloomy emptiness. She paraded down the hall with
him.
As they reached the foot of the stairs, the old one, the night clerk
leaned across the desk and, in a voice that took the whole office into
the conversation, quizzed, "Come from New York, eh? Well, you're quite a
ways from home."
Claire nodded. She felt shyer before these solemnly staring traveling
men than she ever had in a box at the opera. At the double door of the
dining-room, from which the cabbage smell steamed with a lustiness
undiminished by the sad passing of its youth, a man, one of the
average-sized, average-mustached, average business-suited,
average-brown-haired men who can never be remembered, stopped the
Boltwoods and hawed, "Saw you coming into town. You've got a New York
license?"
She couldn't deny it.
"Quite a ways from home, aren't you?"
She had to admit it.
She was escorted by a bouncing, black-eyed waitress to a table for four.
The next table was a long one, at which seven traveling men, or local
business men whose wives were at the lake for the summer, ceased trying
to get nourishment out of the food, and gawped at her. Before the
Boltwoods were seated, the waitress dabbed at non-existent spots on
their napkins, ignored a genuine crumb on the cloth in front of Claire's
plate, made motions at a cup and a formerly plated fork, and bubbled,
"Autoing through?"
Claire fumbled for her chair, oozed into it, and breathed, "Yes."
"Going far?"
"Yes."
"Where do you live?"
"New York."
"My! You're quite a ways from home, aren't you?"
"Apparently."
"Hamnegs roasbeef roaspork thapplesauce frypickerel springlamintsauce."
"I--I beg your pardon."
The waitress repeated.
"I--oh--oh, bring us ham and eggs. Is that all right, father?"
"Oh--no--well----"
"You wanted same?" the waitress inquired of Mr. Boltwood.
He was intimidated. He said, "If you please," and feebly pawed at a
fork.
The waitress was instantly back with soup, and a collection of china
gathered by a man of much travel, catholic interests, and no taste. One
of the plates alleged itself to belong to a hotel in Omaha. She pushed
a pitcher of condensed milk to the exact spot where it would catch Mr.
Boltwood's sleeve, brushed the crumb from in front of Claire to a
shelter beneath the pink and warty sugar bowl, recovered a toothpick
which had been concealed behind her glowing lips, picked for a while,
gave it up, put her hands on her hips, and addressed Claire:
"How far you going?"
"To Seattle."
"Got any folks there?"
"Any---- Oh, yes, I suppose so."
"Going to stay there long?"
"Really---- We haven't decided."
"Come from New York, eh? Quite a ways from home, all right. Father in
business there?"
"Yes."
"What's his line?"
"I beg pardon?"
"What's his line? Ouch! Jiminy, these shoes pinch my feet. I used to
could dance all night, but I'm getting fat, I guess, ha! ha! Put on
seven pounds last month. Ouch! Gee, they certainly do pinch my toes.
What business you say your father's in?"
"I didn't say, but---- Oh, railroad."
"G. N. or N. P.?"
"I don't think I quite understand----"
Mr. Boltwood interposed, "Are the ham and eggs ready?"
"I'll beat it out and see." When she brought them, she put a spoon in
Claire's saucer of peas, and demanded, "Say, you don't wear that silk
dress in the auto, do you?"
"No."
"I should think you'd put a pink sash on it. Seems like it's kind of
plain--it's a real pretty piece of goods, though. A pink sash would be
real pretty. You dark-complected ladies always looks better for a touch
of color."
Then was Claire certain that the waitress was baiting her, for the
amusement of the men at the long table. She exploded. Probably the
waitress did not know there had been an explosion when Claire looked
coldly up, raised her brows, looked down, and poked the cold and salty
slab of ham, for she was continuing:
"A light-complected lady like me don't need so much color, you notice my
hair is black, but I'm light, really, Pete Liverquist says I'm a blonde
brunette, gee, he certainly is killing that fellow, oh, he's a case, he
sure does like to hear himself talk, my! there's Old Man Walters, he
runs the telephone exchange here, I heard he went down to St. Cloud on
Number 2, but I guess he couldn't of, he'll be yodeling for friend soup
and a couple slabs of moo, I better beat it, I'll say so, so long."
Claire's comment was as acid as the pale beets before her, as bitter as
the peas, as hard as the lumps in the watery mashed potatoes:
"I don't know whether the woman is insane or ignorant. I wish I could
tell whether she was trying to make me angry for the benefit of those
horrid unshaven men, or merely for her private edification."
"By me, dolly. So is this pie. Let's get some medium to levitate us up
to bed. Uh--uh---- I think perhaps we'd better not try to drive clear to
Seattle. If we just went through to Montana?--or even just to Bismarck?"
"Drive through with the hotels like this? My dear man, if we have one
more such day, we stop right there. I hope we get by the man at the
desk. I have a feeling he's lurking there, trying to think up something
insulting to say to us. Oh, my dear, I hope you aren't as beastly tired
as I am. My bones are hot pokers."
The man at the desk got in only one cynical question, "Driving far?"
before Claire seized her father's arm and started him upstairs.
For the first time since she had been ten--and in a state of naughtiness
immediately following a pronounced state of grace induced by the pulpit
oratory of the new rector of St. Chrysostom's--she permitted herself the
luxury of not stopping to brush her teeth before she went to bed. Her
sleep was drugged--it was not sleep, but an aching exhaustion of the
body which did not prevent her mind from revisualizing the road, going
stupidly over the muddy stretches and sharp corners, then becoming
conscious of that bed, the lump under her shoulder blades, the slope to
westward, and the creak that rose every time she tossed. For at least
fifteen minutes she lay awake for hours.
Thus Claire Boltwood's first voyage into democracy.
It was not so much that the sun was shining, in the morning, as that a
ripple of fresh breeze came through the window. She discovered that she
again longed to go on--keep going on--see new places, conquer new roads.
She didn't want all good road. She wanted something to struggle against.
She'd try it for one more day. She was stiff as she crawled out of bed,
but a rub with cold water left her feeling that she was stronger than
she ever had been; that she was a woman, not a dependent girl. Already,
in the beating prairie sun-glare, the wide main street of Gopher Prairie
was drying; the mud ruts flattening out. Beyond the town hovered the
note of a meadow lark--sunlight in sound.
"Oh, it's a sweet morning! Sweet! We will go on! I'm terribly excited!"
she laughed.
She found her father dressed. He did not know whether or not he wanted
to go on. "I seem to have lost my grip on things. I used to be rather
decisive. But we'll try it one more day, if you like," he said.
When she had gaily marched him downstairs, she suddenly and unhappily
remembered the people she would have to face, the gibing questions she
would have to answer.
The night clerk was still at the desk, as though he had slept standing.
He hailed them. "Well, well! Up bright and early! Hope you folks slept
well. Beds aren't so good as they might be, but we're kind of planning
to get some new mattresses. But you get pretty good air to sleep in.
Hope you have a fine hike today."
His voice was cordial; he was their old friend; faithful watcher of
their progress. Claire found herself dimpling at him.
In the dining-room their inquisitional acquaintance, the waitress,
fairly ran to them. "Sit down, folks. Waffles this morning. You want to
stock up for your drive. My, ain't it an elegant morning! I hope you
have a swell drive today!"
"Why!" Claire gasped, "why, they aren't rude. They care--about people
they never saw before. That's why they ask questions! I never thought--I
never thought! There's people in the world who want to know us without
having looked us up in the Social Register! I'm so ashamed! Not that the
sunshine changes my impression of this coffee. It's frightful! But that
will improve. And the people--they were being friendly, all the time.
Oh, Henry B., young Henry Boltwood, you and your godmother Claire have
a lot to learn about the world!"
As they came into the garage, their surly acquaintance of the night
before looked just as surly, but Claire tried a boisterous "Good
morning!"
"Mornin'! Going north? Better take the left-hand road at Wakamin. Easier
going. Drive your car out for you?"
As the car stood outside taking on gas, a man flapped up, spelled out
the New York license, looked at Claire and her father, and inquired,
"Quite a ways from home, aren't you?"
This time Claire did not say "Yes!" She experimented with, "Yes, quite a
ways."
"Well, hope you have a good trip. Good luck!"
Claire leaned her head on her hand, thought hard. "It's I who wasn't
friendly," she propounded to her father. "How much I've been losing.
Though I still refuse to like that coffee!"
She noticed the sign on the air-hose of the garage--"Free Air."
"There's our motto for the pilgrimage!" she cried.
She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places
she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.
Thus Claire's second voyage into democracy.
While she was starting the young man who had pulled her out of the mud
and given her lunch was folding up the tarpaulin and blankets on which
he had slept beside his Teal bug, in the woods three miles north of
Gopher Prairie. To the high-well-born cat, Vere de Vere, Milt Daggett
mused aloud, "Your ladyship, as Shakespeare says, the man that gets cold
feet never wins the girl. And I'm scared, cat, clean scared."
CHAPTER V
RELEASE BRAKES--SHIFT TO THIRD
Milt Daggett had not been accurate in his implication that he had not
noticed Claire at a garage in Schoenstrom. For one thing, he owned the
garage.
Milt was the most prosperous young man in the village of Schoenstrom.
Neither the village itself nor the nearby _Strom_ is really _schoen_.
The entire business district of Schoenstrom consists of Heinie
Rauskukle's general store, which is brick; the Leipzig House, which is
frame; the Old Home Poolroom and Restaurant, which is of old logs
concealed by a frame sheathing; the farm-machinery agency, which is
galvanized iron, its roof like an enlarged washboard; the church; the
three saloons; and the Red Trail Garage, which is also, according to
various signs, the Agency for Teal Car Best at the Test, Stonewall Tire
Service Station, Sewing Machines and Binders Repaired, Dr. Hostrum the
Veterinarian every Thursday, Gas Today 27c.
The Red Trail Garage is of cement and tapestry brick. In the office is a
clean hardwood floor, a typewriter, and a picture of Elsie Ferguson. The
establishment has an automatic rim-stretcher, a wheel jack, and a
reputation for honesty.
The father of Milt Daggett was the Old Doctor, born in Maine, coming to
this frontier in the day when Chippewas camped in your dooryard, and
came in to help themselves to coffee, which you made of roasted corn.
The Old Doctor bucked northwest blizzards, read Dickens and Byron,
pulled people through typhoid, and left to Milt his shabby old medicine
case and thousands of dollars--in uncollectible accounts. Mrs. Daggett
had long since folded her crinkly hands in quiet death.
Milt had covered the first two years of high school by studying with the
priest, and been sent to the city of St. Cloud for the last two years.
His father had meant to send him to the state university. But Milt had
been born to a talent for machinery. At twelve he had made a telephone
that worked. At eighteen he was engineer in the tiny flour mill in
Schoenstrom. At twenty-five, when Claire Boltwood chose to come tearing
through his life in a Gomez-Dep, Milt was the owner, manager,
bookkeeper, wrecking crew, ignition expert, thoroughly competent
bill-collector, and all but one of the working force of the Red Trail
Garage.
There were two factions in Schoenstrom: the retired farmers who said
that German was a good enough language for anybody, and that taxes for
schools and sidewalks were yes something crazy; and the group who
stated that a pig-pen is a fine place, but only for pigs. To this
second, revolutionary wing belonged a few of the first generation, most
of the second, and all of the third; and its leader was Milt Daggett. He
did not talk much, normally, but when he thought things ought to be
done, he was as annoying as a machine-gun test in the lot next to a
Quaker meeting.
If there had been a war, Milt would probably have been in it--rather
casual, clearing his throat, reckoning and guessing that maybe his men
might try going over and taking that hill ... then taking it. But all of
this history concerns the year just before America spoke to Germany; and
in this town buried among the cornfields and the wheat, men still
thought more about the price of grain than about the souls of nations.
On the evening before Claire Boltwood left Minneapolis and adventured
into democracy, Milt was in the garage. He wore union overalls that were
tan where they were not grease-black; a faded blue cotton shirt; and the
crown of a derby, with the rim not too neatly hacked off with a dull
toad-stabber jack-knife.
Milt smiled at his assistant, Ben Sittka, and suggested, "Well, _wie
geht 's mit_ the work, eh? Like to stay and get the prof's flivver out,
so he can have it in the morning?"
"You bet, boss."
"Getting to be quite a mechanic, Ben."
"I'll say so!"
"If you get stuck, come yank me out of the Old Home."
"Aw rats, boss. I'll finish it. You beat it." Ben grinned at Milt
adoringly.
Milt stripped off his overalls and derby-crown, and washed his big, firm
hands with gritty soft soap. He cleaned his nails with a file which he
carried in his upper vest pocket in a red imitation morocco case which
contained a comb, a mirror, an indelible pencil, and a note-book with
the smudged pencil addresses of five girls in St. Cloud, and a
memorandum about Rauskukle's car.
He put on a twisted brown tie, an old blue serge suit, and a hat which,
being old and shabby, had become graceful. He ambled up the street. He
couldn't have ambled more than three blocks and have remained on the
street. Schoenstrom tended to leak off into jungles of tall corn.
Two men waved at him, and one demanded, "Say, Milt, is whisky good for
the toothache? What d' you think! The doc said it didn't do any good.
But then, gosh, he's only just out of college."
"I guess he's right."
"Is that a fact! Well, I'll keep off it then."
Two stores farther on, a bulky farmer hailed, "Say, Milt, should I get
an ensilage cutter yet?"
"Yuh," in the manner of a man who knows too much to be cocksure about
anything, "I don't know but what I would, Julius."
"I guess I vill then."
Minnie Rauskukle, plump, hearty Minnie, heiress to the general store,
gave evidence by bridling and straightening her pigeon-like body that
she was aware of Milt behind her. He did not speak to her. He ducked
into the door of the Old Home Poolroom and Restaurant.
Milt ranged up to the short lunch counter, in front of the pool table
where two brick-necked farm youngsters were furiously slamming balls and
attacking cigarettes. Loose-jointedly Milt climbed a loose-jointed high
stool and to the proprietor, Bill McGolwey, his best friend, he yawned,
"You might poison me with a hamburger and a slab of apple, Mac."
"I'll just do that little thing. Look kind of grouchy tonight, Milt."
"Too much excitement in this burg. Saw three people on the streets all
simultaneously to-once."
"What's been eatin' you lately?"
"Me? Nothing. Only I do get tired of this metropolis. One of these days
I'm going to buck some bigger place."
"Try Gopher Prairie maybe?" suggested Mac, through the hiss and steam of
the frying hamburger sandwich.
"Rats. Too small."
"Small? Why, there's darn near five thousand people there!"
"I know, but--I want to tackle some sure-nuff city. Like Duluth or New
York."
"But what'd you do?"
"That's the devil of it. I don't know just what I do want to do. I could
always land soft in a garage, but that's nothing new. Might hit Detroit,
and learn the motor-factory end."
"Aw, you're the limit, Milt. Always looking for something new."
"That's the way to get on. The rest of this town is afraid of new
things. 'Member when I suggested we all chip in on a dynamo with a gas
engine and have electric lights? The hicks almost died of nervousness."
"Yuh, that's true, but---- You stick here, Milt. You and me will just
nachly run this burg."
"I'll say! Only---- Gosh, Mac, I would like to go to a real show, once.
And find out how radio works. And see 'em put in a big suspension
bridge!"
Milt left the Old Home rather aimlessly. He told himself that he
positively would not go back and help Ben Sittka get out the prof's car.
So he went back and helped Ben get out the prof's car, and drove the
same to the prof's. The prof, otherwise professor, otherwise mister,
James Martin Jones, B.A., and Mrs. James Martin Jones welcomed him
almost as noisily as had Mac. They begged him to come in. With Mr.
Jones he discussed--no, ye Claires of Brooklyn Heights, this garage man
and this threadbare young superintendent of a paintbare school, talking
in a town that was only a comma on the line, did not discuss
corn-growing, nor did they reckon to guess that by heck the constabule
was carryin' on with the Widdy Perkins. They spoke of fish-culture,
Elihu Root, the spiritualistic evidences of immortality, government
ownership, self-starters for flivvers, and the stories of Irvin Cobb.
Milt went home earlier than he wanted to. Because Mr. Jones was the only
man in town besides the priest who read books, because Mrs. Jones was
the only woman who laughed about any topics other than children and
family sickness, because he wanted to go to their house every night,
Milt treasured his welcome as a sacred thing, and kept himself from
calling on them more than once a week.
He stopped on his way to the garage to pet Emil Baumschweiger's large
gray cat, publicly known as Rags, but to Milt and to the lady herself
recognized as the unfortunate Countess Vere de Vere--perhaps the only
person of noble ancestry and mysterious past in Milt's acquaintance. The
Baumschweigers did not treat their animals well; Emil kicked the bay
mare, and threw pitchforks at Vere de Vere. Milt saluted her and
sympathized:
"You have a punk time, don't you, countess? Like to beat it to
Minneapolis with me?"
The countess said that she did indeed have an extraordinarily punk time,
and she sang to Milt the hymn of the little gods of the warm hearth.
Then Milt's evening dissipations were over. Schoenstrom has movies only
once a week. He sat in the office of his garage ruffling through a
weekly digest of events. Milt read much, though not too easily. He had
no desire to be a poet, an Indo-Iranian etymologist, a lecturer to
women's clubs, or the secretary of state. But he did rouse to the
marvels hinted in books and magazines; to large crowds, the mechanism of
submarines, palm trees, gracious women.
He laid down the magazine. He stared at the wall. He thought about
nothing. He seemed to be fumbling for something about which he could
deliciously think if he could but grasp it. Without quite visualizing
either wall or sea, he was yet recalling old dreams of a moonlit wall by
a warm stirring southern sea. If there was a girl in the dream she was
intangible as the scent of the night. Presently he was asleep, a not at
all romantic figure, rather ludicrously tipped to one side in his office
chair, his large solid shoes up on the desk.
He half woke, and filtered to what he called home--one room in the
cottage of an oldish woman who had prejudices against the perilous night
air. He was too sleepy to go through any toilet save pulling off his
shoes, and achieving an unconvincing wash at the little stand, whose
crackly varnish was marked with white rings from the toothbrush mug.
"I feel about due to pull off some fool stunt. Wonder what it will be?"
he complained, as he flopped on the bed.
He was up at six, and at a quarter to seven was at work in the garage.
He spent a large part of the morning in trying to prove to a customer
that even a Teal car, best at the test, would not give perfect service
if the customer persisted in forgetting to fill the oil-well, the
grease-cups, and the battery.
At three minutes after twelve Milt left the garage to go to dinner. The
fog of the morning had turned to rain. McGolwey was not at the Old Home.
Sometimes Mac got tired of serving meals, and for a day or two he took
to a pocket flask, and among his former customers the cans of prepared
meat at Rauskukle's became popular. Milt found him standing under the
tin awning of the general store. He had a troubled hope of keeping Mac
from too long a vacation with the pocket flask. But Mac was already
red-eyed. He seemed only half to recognize Milt.
"Swell day!" said Milt.
"Y' bet."
"Road darn muddy."
"I should worry. Yea, bo', I'm feelin' good!"
At eleven minutes past twelve a Gomez-Dep roadster appeared down the
road, stopped at the garage. To Milt it was as exciting as the
appearance of a comet to a watching astronomer.
"What kind of a car do you call that, Milt?" asked a loafer.
"Gomez-Deperdussin."
"Never heard of it. Looks too heavy."
This was sacrilege. Milt stormed, "Why, you poor floof, it's one of the
best cars in the world. Imported from France. That looks like a
special-made American body, though. Trouble with you fellows is, you're
always scared of anything that's new. Too--heavy! Huh! Always wanted to
see a Gomez--never have, except in pictures. And I believe that's a New
York license. Let me at it!"
He forgot noon-hunger, and clumped through the rain to the garage. He
saw a girl step from the car. He stopped, in the doorway of the Old
Home, in uneasy shyness. He told himself he didn't "know just what it is
about her--she isn't so darn unusually pretty and yet--gee---- Certainly
isn't a girl to get fresh with. Let Ben take care of her. Like to talk
to her, and yet I'd be afraid if I opened my mouth, I'd put my foot in
it."
He was for the first time seeing a smart woman. This dark, slender,
fine-nerved girl, in her plain, rough, closely-belted, gray suit, her
small black Glengarry cocked on one side of her smooth hair, her little
kid gloves, her veil, was as delicately adjusted as an aeroplane engine.
Milt wanted to trumpet her exquisiteness to the world, so he growled to
a man standing beside him, "Swell car. Nice-lookin' girl, kind of."
"Kind of skinny, though. I like 'em with some meat on 'em," yawned the
man.
No, Milt did not strike him to earth. He insisted feebly, "Nice clothes
she's got, though."
"Oh, not so muchamuch. I seen a woman come through here yesterday that
was swell, though--had on a purple dress and white shoes and a hat big
's a bushel."
"Well, I don't know, I kind of like those simple things," apologized
Milt.
He crept toward the garage. The girl was inside. He inspected the
slope-topped, patent-leather motoring trunk on the rack at the rear of
the Gomez-Dep. He noticed a middle-aged man waiting in the car. "Must be
her father. Probably--maybe she isn't married then." He could not get
himself to shout at the man, as he usually did. He entered the garage
office; from the inner door he peeped at the girl, who was talking to
his assistant about changing an inner tube.
That Ben Sittka whom an hour ago he had cajoled as a promising child he
now admired for the sniffing calmness with which he was demanding,
"Want a red or gray tube?"
"Really, I don't know. Which is the better?" The girl's voice was
curiously clear.
Milt passed Claire Boltwood as though he did not see her; stood at the
rear of the garage kicking at the tires of a car, his back to her. Over
and over he was grumbling, "If I just knew one girl like that---- Like a
picture. Like--like a silver vase on a blue cloth!"
Ben Sittka did not talk to the girl while he inserted the tube in the
spare casing. Only, in the triumphant moment when the parted ends of the
steel rim snapped back together, he piped, "Going far?"
"Yes, rather. To Seattle."
Milt stared at the cobweb-grayed window. "Now I know what I was planning
to do. I'm going to Seattle," he said.
The girl was gone at twenty-nine minutes after twelve. At twenty-nine
and a half minutes after, Milt remarked to Ben Sittka, "I'm going to
take a trip. Uh? Now don't ask questions. You take charge of the garage
until you hear from me. Get somebody to help you. G'-by."
He drove his Teal bug out of the garage. At thirty-two minutes after
twelve he was in his room, packing his wicker suitcase by the method of
throwing things in and stamping on the case till it closed. In it he
had absolutely all of his toilet refinements and wardrobe except the
important portion already in use. They consisted, according to faithful
detailed report, of four extra pairs of thick yellow and white cotton
socks; two shirts, five collars, five handkerchiefs; a pair of
surprisingly vain dancing pumps; high tan laced boots; three suits of
cheap cotton underclothes; his Sunday suit, which was dead black in
color, and unimaginative in cut; four ties; a fagged toothbrush, a comb
and hairbrush, a razor, a strop, shaving soap in a mug; a not very clean
towel; and nothing else whatever.
To this he added his entire library and private picture gallery,
consisting of Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur, his father's copy of Byron, a wireless
manual, and the 1916 edition of Motor Construction and Repairing: the
art collection, one colored Sunday supplement picture of a princess
lunching in a Provence courtyard, and a half-tone of Colonel Paul Beck
landing in an early military biplane. Under this last, in a pencil
scrawl now blurred to grayness, Milt had once written, "This what Ill be
aviator."
What he was to wear was a piercing trouble. Till eleven minutes past
twelve that day he had not cared. People accepted his overalls at
anything except a dance, and at the dances he was the only one who wore
pumps. But in his discovery of Claire Boltwood he had perceived that
dressing is an art. Before he had packed, he had unhappily pawed at the
prized black suit. It had become stupid. "Undertaker!" he growled.
With a shrug which indicated that he had nothing else, he had exchanged
his overalls for a tan flannel shirt, black bow tie, thick pigskin
shoes, and the suit he had worn the evening before, his best suit of two
years ago--baggy blue serge coat and trousers. He could not know it, but
they were surprisingly graceful on his wiry, firm, white body.
In his pockets were a roll of bills and an unexpectedly good gold watch.
For warmth he had a winter ulster, an old-fashioned turtle-neck sweater,
and a raincoat heavy as tarpaulin. He plunged into the raincoat, ran
out, galloped to Rauskukle's store, bought the most vehement cap in the
place--a plaid of cerise, orange, emerald green, ultramarine, and five
other guaranteed fashionable colors. He stocked up with food for
roadside camping.
In the humping tin-covered tail of the bug was a good deal of room, and
this he filled with motor extras, a shotgun and shells, a pair of
skates, and all his camping kit as used on his annual duck-hunting trip
to Man Trap Lake.
"I'm a darned fool to take everything I own but---- Might be gone a
whole month," he reflected.
He had only one possession left--a check book, concealed from the
interested eye of his too maternal landlady by sticking it under the
stair carpet. This he retrieved. It showed a balance of two hundred
dollars. There was ten dollars in the cash register in the office, for
Ben Sittka. The garage would, with the mortgage deducted, be worth
nearly two thousand. This was his fortune.
He bolted into the kitchen and all in one shout he informed his
landlady, "Called out of town, li'l trip, b'lieve I don't owe you
an'thing, here's six dollars, two weeks' notice, dunno just when I be
back."
Before she could issue a questionnaire he was out in the bug. He ran
through town. At his friend McGolwey; now loose-lipped and wabbly,
sitting in the rain on a pile of ties behind the railroad station, he
yelled, "So long, Mac. Take care yourself, old hoss. Off on li'l trip."
He stopped in front of the "prof's," tooted till the heads of the
Joneses appeared at the window, waved and shouted, "G'-by, folks. Goin'
outa town."
Then, while freedom and the distant Pacific seemed to rush at him over
the hood, he whirled out of town. It was two minutes to one--forty-seven
minutes since Claire Boltwood had entered Schoenstrom.
He stopped only once. His friend Lady Vere de Vere was at the edge of
town, on a scientific exploring trip in the matter of ethnology and
field mice. She hailed him, "Mrwr? Me mrwr!"
"You don't say so!" Milt answered in surprise. "Well, if I promised to
take you, I'll keep my word." He vaulted out, tucked Vere de Vere into
the seat, protecting her from the rain with the tarpaulin winter
radiator-cover.
His rut-skipping car overtook the mud-walloping Gomez-Dep in an hour,
and pulled it out of the mud.
Before Milt slept that night, in his camp three miles from Gopher
Prairie, he went through religious rites.
"Girl like her, she's darn particular about her looks. I'm a sloppy
hound. Used to be snappier about my clothes when I was in high school.
Getting lazy--too much like Mac. Think of me sleeping in my clothes last
night!"
"Mrwr!" rebuked the cat.
"You're dead right. Fierce is the word. Nev' will sleep in my duds
again, puss. That is, when I have a reg'lar human bed. Course camping,
different. But still---- Let's see all the funny things we can do to
us."
He shaved--two complete shaves, from lather to towel. He brushed his
hair. He sat down by a campfire sheltered between two rocks, and fought
his nails, though they were discouragingly crammed with motor grease.
Throughout this interesting but quite painful ceremony Milt kept up a
conversation between himself as the World's Champion Dude, and his cat
as Vallay. But when there was nothing more to do, and the fire was low,
and Vere de Vere asleep in the sleeve of the winter ulster, his
bumbling voice slackened; in something like agony he muttered:
"But oh, what's the use? I can't ever be anything but a dub! Cleaning my
nails, to make a hit with a girl that's got hands like hers! It's a long
trail to Seattle, but it's a darn sight longer one to being--being--well,
sophisticated. Oh! And incidentally, what the deuce am I going to do in
Seattle if I do get there?"
CHAPTER VI
THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS
Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew.
Rippling and blue, with long grass up to its edge, a spot of dancing
light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an
afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring
morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley
or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the
occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on
the treeless Great Plains.
She had learned to call the slews "pugholes," and to watch for ducks at
twilight. She had learned that about the pugholes flutter choirs of
crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on
fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble
cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or
an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of
the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the
prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.
She had learned that what had seemed rudeness in garage men and hotel
clerks was often a resentful reflection of her own Eastern attitude
that she was necessarily superior to a race she had been trained to call
"common people." If she spoke up frankly, they made her one of their
own, and gave her companionable aid.
For two days of sunshine and drying mud she followed a road flung
straight across flat wheatlands, then curving among low hills. Often
there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the
fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but
a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot that she was driving,
as she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of
clouds, prairie clouds, wisps of vapor like a ribbed beach, or mounts of
cumulus swelling to gold-washed snowy peaks.
The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed
of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded
to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and
shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small
abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed
stores.
Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days
were colored with the sun.
She had discovered, too, that she could adventure. No longer was she
haunted by the apprehension that had whispered to her as she had left
Minneapolis. She knew a thrill when she hailed--as though it were a
passing ship--an Illinois car across whose dust-caked back was a banner
"Chicago to the Yellowstone." She experienced a new sensation of common
humanness when, on a railway paralleling the wagon road for miles, the
engineer of a freight waved his hand to her, and tooted the whistle in
greeting.
Her father was easily tired, but he drowsed through the early afternoons
when a none-too-digestible small-town lunch was as lead within him.
Despite the beauty of the land and the joy of pushing on, they both had
things to endure.
After lunch, it was sometimes an agony to Claire to keep awake. Her eyes
felt greasy from the food, or smarted with the sun-glare. In the still
air, after the morning breeze had been burnt out, the heat from the
engine was a torment about her feet; and if there was another car ahead,
the trail of dust sifted into her throat. Unless there was traffic to
keep her awake, she nodded at the wheel; she was merely a part of a
machine that ran on without seeming to make any impression on the
prairie's endlessness.
Over and over there were the same manipulations: slow for down hill,
careful of sand at the bottom, letting her out on a smooth stretch,
waving to a lonely farmwife in her small, baked dooryard, slow to pass a
hay-wagon, gas for up the next hill, and repeat the round all over
again. But she was joyous till noon; and with mid-afternoon a new
strength came which, as rose crept above the golden haze of dust,
deepened into serene meditation.
And she was finding the one secret of long-distance driving--namely,
driving; keeping on, thinking by fifty-mile units, not by the ten-mile
stretches of Long Island runs; and not fretting over anything whatever.
She seemed charmed; if she had a puncture--why, she put on the spare. If
she ran out of gas--why, any passing driver would lend her a gallon.
Nothing, it seemed, could halt her level flight across the giant land.
She rarely lost her way. She was guided by the friendly trail
signs--those big red R's and L's on fence post and telephone pole,
magically telling the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Her father's occasional musing talk kept her from loneliness. He was a
good touring companion. Motoring is not the best occasion for epigrams,
satire, and the Good One You Got Off at the Lambs' Club last night. Such
verbiage on motor trips invariably results in the mysterious finding of
the corpse of a strange man, well dressed, hidden beside the road.
Claire and her father mumbled, "Good farmhouse--brick," or "Nice view,"
and smiled, and were for miles as silent as the companionable sky.
She thought of the people she knew, especially of Jeff Saxton. But she
could not clearly remember his lean earnest face. Between her and Jeff
were sweeping sunny leagues. But she was not lonely. Certainly she was
not lonely for a young man with a raincoat, a cat, and an interest in
Japan.
No singer after a first concert has felt more triumphant than Claire
when she crossed her first state-line; rumbled over the bridge across
the Red River into North Dakota. To see Dakota car licenses everywhere,
instead of Minnesota, was like the sensation of street signs in a new
language. And when she found a good hotel in Fargo and had a real bath,
she felt that by her own efforts she had earned the right to enjoy it.
Mr. Boltwood caught her enthusiasm. Dinner was a festival, and in iced
tea the peaceful conquistadores drank the toast of the new Spanish Main;
and afterward, arm in arm, went chattering to the movies.
In front of the Royal Palace, Pictures, 4 Great Acts Vaudeville 4, was
browsing a small, beetle-like, tin-covered car.
"Dad! Look! I'm sure--yes, of course, there's his suitcase--that's the
car of that nice boy--don't you remember?--the one that pulled us out of
the mud at--I don't remember the name of the place. Apparently he's
keeping going. I remember; he's headed for Seattle, too. We'll look for
him in the theater. Oh, the darling, there's his cat! What was the funny
name he gave her--the Marchioness Montmorency or something?"
Lady Vere de Vere, afraid of Fargo and movie crowds, but trusting in her
itinerant castle, the bug, was curled in Milt Daggett's ulster, in the
bottom of the car. She twinkled her whiskers at Claire, and purred to a
stroking hand.
With the excitement of one trying to find the address of a friend in a
strange land Claire looked over the audience when the lights came on
before the vaudeville. In the second row she saw Milt's stiffish,
rope-colored hair--surprisingly smooth above an astoundingly clean new
tan shirt of mercerized silk.
He laughed furiously at the dialogue between Pete-Rosenheim &
Larose-Bettina, though it contained the cheese joke, the mother-in-law
joke, and the joke about the wife rifling her husband's pockets.
"Our young friend seems to have enviable youthful spirits," commented
Mr. Boltwood.
"Now, no superiority! He's probably never seen a real vaudeville show.
Wouldn't it be fun to take him to the Winter Garden or the Follies for
the first time!... Instead of being taken by Jeff Saxton, and having the
humor, oh! so articulately explained!"
The pictures were resumed; the film which, under ten or twelve different
titles, Claire had already seen, even though Brooklyn Heights does not
devote Saturday evening to the movies. The badman, the sheriff--an aged
party with whiskers and boots--the holdup, the sad eyes of the sheriff's
daughter--also an aged party, but with a sunbonnet and the most
expensive rouge--the crook's reformation, and his violent adherence to
law and order; this libel upon the portions of these United States lying
west of longitude 101 deg. Claire had seen too often. She dragged her father
back to the hotel, sent him to bed, and entered her room--to find a
telegram upon the bureau.
She had sent her friends a list of the places at which she would be
likely to stop. The message was from Jeff Saxton, in Brooklyn. It
brought to her mind the steady shine of his glasses--the most expensive
glasses, with the very best curved lenses--as it demanded:
"Received letter about trip surprised anxious will tire you out
fatigue prairie roads bad for your father mountain roads dangerous
strongly advise go only part way then take train. GEOFFREY."
She held the telegram, flipping her fingers against one end of it as she
debated. She remembered how the wide world had flowed toward her over
the hood of the Gomez all day. She wrote in answer:
"Awful perils of road, two punctures, split infinitive, eggs at
lunch questionable, but struggle on."
Before she sent it she held council with her father. She sat on the foot
of his bed and tried to sound dutiful. "I don't want to do anything
that's bad for you, daddy. But isn't it taking your mind away from
business?"
"Ye-es, I think it is. Anyway, we'll try it a few days more."
"I fancy we can stand up under the strain and perils. I think we can
persuade some of these big farmers to come to the rescue if we encounter
any walruses or crocodiles among the wheat. And I have a feeling that if
we ever get stuck, our friend of the Teal bug will help us."
"Probably never see him again. He'll skip on ahead of us."
"Of course. We haven't laid an eye on him, along the road. He must have
gotten into Fargo long before we did. Now tomorrow I think----"
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT AMERICAN FRYING PAN
It was Claire's first bad day since the hole in the mud. She had started
gallantly, scooting along the level road that flies straight west of
Fargo. But at noon she encountered a restaurant which made eating seem
an evil.
That they might have fair fame among motorists the commercial club of
Reaper had set at the edge of town a sign "Welcome to Reaper, a Live
Town--Speed Limit 8 Miles perhr." Being interpreted, that sign meant
that if you went much over twenty miles an hour on the main street,
people might glance at you; and that the real welcome, the only
impression of Reaper that tourists were likely to carry away, was the
welcome in the one restaurant. It was called the Eats Garden. As Claire
and her father entered, they were stifled by a belch of smoke from the
frying pan in the kitchen. The room was blocked by a huge lunch counter;
there was only one table, covered with oil cloth decorated with
venerable spots of dried egg yolk.
The waiter-cook, whose apron was gravy-patterned, with a border and
stomacher of plain gray dirt, grumbled, "Whadyuhwant?"
Claire sufficiently recovered to pick out the type from the fly specks
on the menu, and she ordered a small steak and coffee for her father;
for herself tea, boiled eggs, toast.
"Toast? We ain't got any toast!"
"Well, can't you make it?"
"Oh, I suppose I could----"
When they came, the slices of toast were an inch thick, burnt on one
side and raw on the other. The tea was bitter and the eggs watery. Her
father reported that his steak was high-test rawhide, and his
coffee--well, he wasn't sure just what substitute had been used for
chicory, but he thought it was lukewarm quinine.
Claire raged: "You know, this town really has aspirations. They're
beginning to build such nice little bungalows, and there's a fine clean
bank---- Then they permit this scoundrel to advertise the town among
strangers, influential strangers, in motors, by serving food like this!
I suppose they think that they arrest criminals here, yet this
restaurant man is a thief, to charge real money for food like this----
Yes, and he's a murderer!"
"Oh, come now, dolly!"
"Yes he is, literally. He must in his glorious career have given chronic
indigestion to thousands of people--shortened their lives by years.
That's wholesale murder. If I were the authorities here, I'd be
indulgent to the people who only murder one or two people, but imprison
this cook for life. Really! I mean it!"
"Well, he probably does the best he----"
"He does not! These eggs and this bread were perfectly good, before he
did black magic over them. And did you see the contemptuous look he gave
me when I was so eccentric as to order toast? Oh, Reaper, Reaper, you
desire a modern town, yet I wonder if you know how many thousands of
tourists go from coast to coast, cursing you? If I could only hang that
restaurant man--and the others like him--in a rope of his own hempen
griddle cakes! The Great American Frying Pan! I don't expect men
building a new town to have time to read Hugh Walpole and James Branch
Cabell, but I do expect them to afford a cook who can fry eggs!"
As she paid the check, Claire tried to think of some protest which would
have any effect on the obese wits of the restaurant man. In face of his
pink puffiness she gave it up. Her failure as a Citizeness Fixit sent
her out of the place in a fury, carried her on in a dusty whirl till the
engine spat, sounded tired and reflective, and said it guessed it
wouldn't go any farther that day.
Now that she had something to do, Claire became patient. "Run out of
gas. Isn't it lucky I got that can for an extra gallon?"
But there was plenty of gas. There was no discernible reason why the
car should not go. She started the engine. It ran for half a minute and
quit. All the plugs showed sparks. No wires were detached in the
distributor. There was plenty of water, and the oil was not clogged. And
that ended Claire's knowledge of the inside of a motor.
She stopped two motorists. The first was sure that there was dirt on the
point of the needle valve, in the carburetor. While Claire shuddered
lest he never get it back, he took out the needle valve, wiped it, put
it back--and the engine was again started, and again, with great
promptness, it stopped.
The second Good Samaritan knew that one of the wires in the distributor
must be detached and, though she assured him that she had inspected
them, he looked pityingly at her smart sports-suit, said, "Well, I'll
just take a look," and removed the distributor cover. He also scratched
his head, felt of the fuses under the cowl, scratched his cheek, poked a
finger at the carburetor, rubbed his ear, said, "Well, uh----" looked to
see if there was water and gas, sighed, "Can't just seem to find out
what's the trouble," shot at his own car, and escaped.
Claire had been highly grateful and laudatory to both of them--but she
remained here, ten miles from nowhere. It was a beautiful place. Down a
hill the wheat swam toward a village whose elevator was a glistening
tower. Mud-hens gabbled in a slew, alfalfa shone with unearthly green,
and bees went junketing toward a field of red clover. But she had the
motorist's fever to go on. The road behind and in front was very long,
very white--and very empty.
Her father, out of much thought and a solid ignorance about all of
motoring beyond the hiring of chauffeurs and the payment of bills,
suggested, "Uh, dolly, have you looked to see if these, uh---- Is the
carburetor all right?"
"Yes, dear; I've looked at it three times, so far," she said, just a
little too smoothly.
On the hill five miles to eastward, a line of dust, then a small car. As
it approached, the driver must have sighted her and increased speed. He
came up at thirty-five miles an hour.
"Now we'll get something done! Look! It's a bug--a flivver or a Teal or
something. I believe it's the young man that got us out of the mud."
Milt Daggett stopped, casually greeted them: "Why, hello, Miss Boltwood.
Thought you'd be way ahead of me some place!"
"Mrwr," said Vere de Vere. What this meant the historian does not know.
"No; I've been taking it easy. Mr., Uh--I can't quite remember your
name----"
"Milt Daggett."
"There's something mysterious the matter with my car. The engine will
start, after it's left alone a while, but then it stalls. Do you
suppose you could tell what it is?"
"I don't know. I'll see if I can find out."
"Then you probably will. The other two men knew everything. One of them
was the inventor of wheels, and the other discovered skidding. So of
course they couldn't help me."
Milt added nothing to her frivolity, but his smile was friendly. He
lifted the round rubber cap of the distributor. Then Claire's faith
tumbled in the dust. Twice had the wires been tested. Milt tested them
again. She was too tired of botching to tell him he was wasting time.
"Got an oil can?" he hesitated.
Through a tiny hole in the plate of the distributor he dripped two drops
of oil--only two drops. "I guess maybe that's what it needed. You might
try her now, and see how she runs," he said mildly.
Dubiously Claire started the engine. It sang jubilantly, and it did not
stop. Again was the road open to her. Again was the settlement over
there, to which it would have taken her an hour to walk, only six
minutes away.
She stopped the engine, beamed at him--there in the dust, on the quiet
hilltop. He said as apologetically as though he had been at fault,
"Distributor got dry. Might give it a little oil about once in six
months."
"We are so grateful to you! Twice now you've saved our lives."
"Oh, I guess you'd have gone on living! And if drivers can't help each
other, who can?"
"That's a good start toward world-fellowship, I suppose. I wish we could
do---- Return your lunch or---- Mr. Daggett! Do you read books? I
mean----"
"Yes I do, when I run across them."
"Mayn't I gi--lend you these two that I happen to have along? I've
finished them, and so has father, I think."
From the folds of the strapped-down top she pulled out Compton
Mackenzie's _Youth's Encounter_, and Vachel Lindsay's _Congo_. With a
curious faint excitement she watched him turn the leaves. His blunt
fingers flapped through them as though he was used to books. As he
looked at _Congo_, he exclaimed, "Poetry! That's fine! Like it, but I
don't hardly ever run across it. I---- Say---- I'm terribly obliged!"
His clear face lifted, sun-brown and young and adoring. She had not
often seen men look at her thus. Certainly Jeff Saxton's painless
worship did not turn him into the likeness of a knight among banners.
Yet the good Geoffrey loved her, while to Milt Daggett she could be
nothing more than a strange young woman in a car with a New York
license. If her tiny gift could so please him, how poor he must be. "He
probably lives on some barren farm," she thought, "or he's a penniless
mechanic hoping for a good job in Seattle. How white his forehead is!"
But aloud she was saying, "I hope you're enjoying your trip."
"Oh yes. I like it fine. You having a good time? Well---- Well, thanks
for the books."
She was off before him. Presently she exclaimed to Mr. Boltwood: "You
know--just occurs to me--it's rather curious that our young friend
should be so coincidental as to come along just when we needed him."
"Oh, he just happened to, I suppose," hemmed her father.
"I'm not so sure," she meditated, while she absently watched another
member of the Poultry Suicide Club rush out of a safe ditch, prepare to
take leave for immortality, change her fowlish mind, flutter up over the
hood of the car, and come down squawking her indignities to the
barnyard. "I'm not so sure about his happening---- No. I wonder if he
could possibly---- Oh no. I hope not. Flattering, but---- You don't
suppose he could be deliberately following us?"
"Nonsense! He's a perfectly decent young chap."
"I know. Of course. He probably works hard in a garage, and is terribly
nice to his mother and sisters at home. I mean---- I wouldn't want the
dear lamb to be a devoted knight, though. Too thankless a job."
She slowed the car down to fifteen an hour. For the first time she began
to watch the road behind her. In a few minutes a moving spot showed in
the dust three miles back. Oh, naturally; he would still be behind her.
Only---- If she stopped, just to look at the scenery, he would go on
ahead of her. She stopped for a moment--for a time too brief to indicate
that anything had gone wrong with her car. Staring back she saw that the
bug stopped also, and she fancied that Milt was out standing beside it,
peering with his palm over his eyes--a spy, unnatural and disturbing in
the wide peace.
She drove on a mile and halted again; again halted her attendant. He was
keeping a consistent two to four miles behind, she estimated.
"This won't do at all," she worried. "Flattering, but somehow----
Whatever sort of a cocoon-wrapped hussy I am, I don't collect scalps. I
won't have young men serving me--graft on them--get amusement out of
their struggles. Besides--suppose he became just a little more friendly,
each time he came up, all the way from here to Seattle?... Fresh.... No,
it won't do."
She ran the car to the side of the road.
"More trouble?" groaned her father.
"No. Just want to see scenery."
"But---- There's a good deal of scenery on all sides, without stopping,
seems to me!"
"Yes, but----" She looked back. Milt had come into sight; had paused to
take observations. Her father caught it:
"Oh, I see. Pardon me. Our squire still following? Let him go on ahead?
Wise lass."
"Yes. I think perhaps it's better to avoid complications."
"Of course." Mr. Boltwood's manner did not merely avoid Milt; it
abolished him.
She saw Milt, after five minutes of stationary watching, start forward.
He came dustily rattling up with a hail of "Distributor on strike
again?" so cheerful that it hurt her to dismiss him. But she had managed
a household. She was able to say suavely:
"No, everything is fine. I'm sure it will be, now. I'm afraid we are
holding you back. You mustn't worry about us."
"Oh, that's all right," breezily. "Something might go wrong. Say, is
this poetry book----"
"No, I'm sure nothing will go wrong now. You mustn't feel responsible
for us. But, uh, you understand we're very grateful for what you have
done and, uh, perhaps we shall see each other in Seattle?" She made it
brightly interrogatory.
"Oh, I see." His hands gripped the wheel. His cheeks had been too
ruddily tinted by the Dakota sun to show a blush, but his teeth caught
his lower lip. He had no starter on his bug; he had in his embarrassment
to get out and crank. He did it quietly, not looking at her. She could
see that his hand trembled on the crank. When he did glance at her, as
he drove off, it was apologetically, miserably. His foot was shaking on
the clutch pedal.
The dust behind his car concealed him. For twenty miles she was silent,
save when she burst out to her father, "I do hope you're enjoying the
trip. It's so easy to make people unhappy. I wonder---- No. Had to be
done."
CHAPTER VIII
THE DISCOVERY OF CANNED SHRIMPS AND HESPERIDES
On the morning when Milt Daggett had awakened to sunshine in the woods
north of Gopher Prairie, he had discovered the golden age. As mile on
mile he jogged over new hills, without having to worry about getting
back to his garage in time to repair somebody's car, he realized that
for the past two years he had forced himself to find contentment in
building up a business that had no future.
Now he laughed and whooped; he drove with one foot inelegantly and
enchantingly up on the edge of the cowl; he made Lady Vere de Vere bow
to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening--twice, in
Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a
hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging
awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some
day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk,
but---- All those hills to sail over and---- Come on! Lez sail!"
Milt attended the motion pictures every evening, and he saw them in a
new way. As recently as one week before he had preferred those earnest
depictions in which hard-working, moral actors shoot one another, or
ride the most uncomfortable horses up mountainsides. But now, with a
mental apology to that propagandist of lowbrowism, the absent Mac, he
chose the films in which the leading men wore evening clothes, and no
one ever did anything without being assisted by a "man." Aside from the
pictures Milt's best tutors were traveling men. Though he measured every
cent, and for his campfire dinners bought modest chuck steaks, he had at
least one meal a day at a hotel, to watch the traveling men.
To Claire, traveling men were merely commercial persons in hard-boiled
suits. She identified them with the writing-up of order-slips on long
littered writing-tables, and with hotels that reduced the delicate arts
of dining and sleeping to gray greasiness. But Milt knew traveling men.
He knew that not only were they the missionaries of business,
supplementing the taking of orders by telling merchants how to build up
trade, how to trim windows and treat customers like human beings; but
also that they, as much as the local ministers and doctors and teachers
and newspapermen, were the agents in spreading knowledge and justice. It
was they who showed the young men how to have their hair cut--and to
wash behind the ears and shave daily; they who encouraged villagers to
rise from scandal and gossip to a perception of the Great World, of
politics and sports, and some measure of art and science.
Claire, and indeed her father and Mr. Jeff Saxton as well, had vaguely
concluded that because drummers were always to be seen in soggy hotels
and badly connecting trains and the headachy waiting-rooms of stations,
they must like these places. Milt knew that the drummers were martyrs;
that for months of a trip, all the while thinking of the children back
home, they suffered from landlords and train schedules; that they were
Claire's best allies in fighting the Great American Frying Pan; that
they knew good things, and fought against the laziness and impositions
of people who "kept hotel" because they had failed as farmers; and that
when they did find a landlord who was cordial and efficient, they went
forth mightily advertising that glorious man. The traveling men, he
knew, were pioneers in spats.
Hence it was to the traveling men, not to supercilious tourists in
limousines, that Milt turned for suggestions as to how to perform the
miracle of changing from an ambitious boy into what Claire would
recognize as a charming man. He had not met enough traveling men at
Schoenstrom. They scooped up what little business there was, and escaped
from the Leipzig House to spend the night at St. Cloud or Sauk Centre.
In the larger towns in Minnesota and Dakota, after evening movies,
before slipping out to his roadside camp Milt inserted himself into a
circle of traveling men in large leather chairs, and ventured, "Saw a
Gomez-Dep with a New York license down the line today."
"Oh. You driving through?"
"Yes. Going to Seattle."
That distinguished Milt from the ordinary young-men-loafers, and he was
admitted as one of the assembly of men who traveled and saw things and
wondered about the ways of men. It was good talk he heard; too much of
hotels, and too many tight banal little phrases suggesting the solution
of all economic complexities by hanging "agitators," but with this, an
exciting accumulation of impressions of Vancouver and San Diego, Florida
and K. C.
"That's a wonderful work farm they have at Duluth," said one, and the
next, "speaking of that, I was in Chicago last week, and I saw a
play----"
Milt had, in his two years of high school in St. Cloud, and in his
boyhood under the genial but abstracted eye of the Old Doctor, learned
that it was not well thought of to use the knife as a hod and to plaster
mashed potatoes upon it, as was the custom in Mac's Old Home Lunch at
Schoenstrom. But the arts of courteously approaching oysters, salad, and
peas were rather unfamiliar to him. Now he studied forks as he had once
studied carburetors, and he gave spiritual devotion to the nice eating
of a canned-shrimp cocktail--a lost legion of shrimps, now two thousand
miles and two years away from their ocean home.
He peeped with equal earnestness at the socks and the shirts of the
traveling men. Socks had been to him not an article of faith but a
detail of economy. His attitude to socks had lacked in reverence and
technique. He had not perceived that socks may be as sound a symbol of
culture as the 'cello or even demountable rims. He had been able to
think with respect of ties and damp pique collars secured by gold
safety-pins; and to the belted fawn overcoat that the St. Klopstock
banker's son had brought back from St. Paul, he had given jealous
attention. But now he graduated into differential socks.
By his campfire, sighing to the rather somnolent Vere de Vere, he
scornfully yanked his extra pairs of thick, white-streaked, yellow
cotton socks from the wicker suitcase, and uttered anathema:
"Begone, ye unworthy and punk-looking raiment. I know ye! Ye werst a
bargain and two pairs for two bits. But even as Adolph Zolzac and an
agent for flivver accessories are ye become in my eyes, ye generation of
vipers, ye clumsy, bag-footed, wrinkle-sided gunny-sacking ye!"
Next day, in the woods, a happy hobo found that the manna-bringing
ravens had left him four pairs of good socks.
Five quite expensive pairs of silk and lisle socks Milt purchased--all
that the general merchant at Jeppe had in stock. What they lost in
suitability to touring and to private laundering at creeks, they gained
as symbols. Milt felt less shut out from the life of leisure. Now, in
Seattle, say, he could go into a good hotel with less fear of the
clerks.
He added attractive outing shirts, ties neither too blackly dull nor too
flashily crimson, and a vicious nail-brush which simply tore out the
motor grease that had grown into the lines of his hands. Also he added a
book.
The book was a rhetoric. Milt knew perfectly that there was an
impertinence called grammar, but it had never annoyed him much. He knew
that many persons preferred "They were" to "They was," and were nervous
in the presence of "ain't." One teacher in St. Cloud had buzzed
frightfully about these minutiae. But Milt discovered that grammar was
only the beginning of woes. He learned that there were such mental
mortgages as figures of speech and the choice of synonyms. He had always
known, but he had never passionately felt that the invariable use of
"hell," "doggone," and "You bet!" left certain subtleties unexpressed.
Now he was finding subtleties which he had to express.
As joyously adventurous as going on day after day was his
experimentation in voicing his new observations. He gave far more
eagerness to it than Claire Boltwood had. Gustily intoning to Vere de
Vere, who was the perfect audience, inasmuch as she never had anything
to say but "Mrwr," and didn't mind being interrupted in that, he
clamored, "The prairies are the sea. In the distance they are kind of
silvery--no--they are dim silver; and way off on the skyline are the
Islands of the--of the---- Now what the devil was them, were those,
islands in the mythology book in high school? Of the--Blessed? Great
snakes' boots, you're an ignorant cat, Vere! Hesperyds? No! Hesperides!
Yea, bo'! Now that man in the hotel: 'May I trouble you for the train
guide? Thanks so much!' But how much is so much?"
As Claire's days were set free by her consciousness of sun and brown
earth, so Milt's odyssey was only the more valorous in his endeavor to
criticize life. He saw that Mac's lunch room had not been an altogether
satisfactory home; that Mac's habit of saying to dissatisfied customers,
"If you don't like it, get out," had lacked something of courtesy.
Staring at towns along the way, Milt saw that houses were not merely
large and comfortable, or small and stingy; but that there was an
interesting thing he remembered hearing his teachers call "good taste."
He was not the preoccupied Milt of the garage but a gay-eyed gallant,
the evening when he gave a lift to the school-teacher and drove her from
the district school among the wild roses and the corn to her home in the
next town. She was a neat, tripping, trim-sided school-teacher of
nineteen or twenty.
"You're going out to Seattle? My! That's a wonderful trip. Don't you get
tired?" she adored.
"Oh, no. And I'm seeing things. I used to think everything worth while
was right near my own town."
"You're so wise to go places. Most of the boys I know don't think there
is any world beyond Jimtown and Fargo."
She glowed at him. Milt was saying to himself, "Am I a fool? I probably
could make this girl fall in love with me. And she's better than I am;
so darn neat and clean and gentle. We'd be happy. She's a nice comfy
fire, and here I go like a boob, chasing after a lone, cold star like
Miss Boltwood, and probably I'll fall into all the slews from hell to
breakfast on the way. But---- I'd get sleepy by a comfy fire."
"Are you thinking hard? You're frowning so," ventured the
school-teacher.
"Didn't mean to. 'Scuse!" he laughed. One hand off the steering wheel,
he took her hand--a fresh, cool, virginal hand, snuggling into his,
suddenly stirring him. He wanted to hold it tighter. The lamenting
historian of love's pilgrimage must set down the fact that the pilgrim
for at least a second forgot the divine tread of the goddess Claire, and
made rapid calculation that he could, in a pinch, drive from Schoenstrom
to the teacher's town in two days and a night; that therefore courtship,
and this sweet white hand resting in his, were not impossible. Milt
himself did not know what it was that made him lay down the hand and
say, so softly that he was but half audible through the rattle of the
engine:
"Isn't this a slick, mean to say glorious evening? Sky rose and then
that funny lavender. And that new moon---- Makes me think of--the girl
I'm in love with."
"You're engaged?" wistfully.
"Not exactly but---- Say, did you study rhetoric in Normal School? I
have a rhetoric that's got all kind of poetic extracts, you know, and
quotations and everything, from the big writers, Stevenson and all.
Always been so practical, making a garage pay, never thought much about
how I said things as long as I could say 'No!' and say it quick. 'Cept
maybe when I was talking to the prof there. But it's great sport to see
how musical you can make a thing sound. Words. Like Shenandoah. Gol-lee!
Isn't that a wonderful word? Makes you see old white mansion, and
mocking birds---- Wonder if a fellow could be a big engineer, you know,
build bridges and so on, and still talk about, oh, beautiful things?
What d' you think, girlie?"
"Oh, I'm sure you could!"
Her admiration, the proximity of her fragrant slightness, was pleasant
in the dusk, but he did not press her hand again, even when she
whispered, "Good night, and thank you--oh, thank you."
If Milt had been driving at the rate at which he usually made his
skipjack carom over the roads about Schoenstrom, he would by now have
been through Dakota, into Montana. But he was deliberately holding down
the speed. When he had been tempted by a smooth stretch to go too
breathlessly, he halted, teased Vere de Vere, climbed out and, sitting
on a hilltop, his hands about his knees, drenched his soul with the
vision of amber distances.
He tried so to time his progress that he might always be from three to
five miles behind Claire--distant enough to be unnoticed, near enough to
help in case of need. For behind poetic expression and the use of forks
was the fact that his purpose in life was to know Claire.
When he was caught, when Claire informed him that he "mustn't worry
about her"; when, slowly, he understood that she wasn't being neighborly
and interested in his making time, he wanted to escape, never to see her
again.
For thirty miles his cheeks were fiery. He, most considerate of roadmen,
crowded a woman in a flivver, passed a laboring car on an upgrade with
such a burst that the uneasy driver bumped off into a ditch. He hadn't
really seen them. Only mechanically had he got past them. He was
muttering:
"She thought I was trying to butt in! Stung again! Like a small boy in
love with teacher. And I thought I was so wise! Cussed out Mac--blamed
Mac--no, damn all the fine words--cussed out Mac for being the village
rumhound. Boozing is twice as sensible as me. See a girl, nice
dress--start for Seattle! Two thousand miles away! Of course she bawled
me out. She was dead right. Boob! Yahoo! Goat!"
He caught up Vere de Vere, rubbed her fur against his cheek while he
mourned, "Oh, puss, you got to be nice to me. I thought I'd do big
things. And then the alarm clock went off. I'm back in Schoenstrom. For
keeps, I guess. I didn't know I had feelings that could get hurt like
this. Thought I had a rhinoceros hide. But---- Oh, it isn't just feeling
ashamed over being a fool. It's that---- Won't ever see her again. Not
once. Way I saw her through the window, at that hotel, in that blue
silky dress--that funny long line of buttons, and her throat. Never have
dinner--lunch--with her by the road----"
In the reaction of anger he demanded of Vere de Vere, "What the deuce do
I care? If she's chump enough to chase away a crack garage man that's
gone batty and wants to work for nothing, let her go on and hit some
crook garage and get stuck for an entire overhauling. What do I care?
Had nice trip; that's all I wanted. Never did intend to go clear to
Seattle, anyway. Go on to Butte, then back home. No more fussing about
fool table-manners and books, and I certainly will cut out tagging
behind her! No, sir! Nev-er again!"
It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in
and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next
time!"
While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an
abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected
tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.
The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen
door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the
porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over
the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank grass about the slimy
green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was
open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty
binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As
dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of
the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was
sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was
absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere
carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the
screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"
This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never
seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and
to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never
crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken
aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come
to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had
left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of
murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed
dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling
"Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet, a poet rhymeless and
inarticulate, who huddled behind the shield of untrimmed currant bushes,
and thought of the girl he would never see again.
He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.
He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the
powdery beauty of _Youth's Encounter_; by the vision of laughter and
dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not
"roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and
faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never
known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.
In Vachel Lindsay's _Congo_, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he
found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was
the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of passing cars. But Milt
belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the
grass that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight:
Swiftly the brazen car comes on.
It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.
I see great flashes where the far trail turns.
Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,
It comes like lightning, goes past roaring,
It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing,
On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills--
Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.
Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn,
Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.
Milt did not reflect that if the poet had watched the Teal bug go by, he
would not have recorded a scare-horn, a dare-horn, or anything mightier
than a yip-horn. Milt saw himself a cross-continent racer, with the
envious poet, left behind as a dot on the hill, celebrating his passing.
"Lord!" he cried. "I didn't know there were books like these! Thought
poetry was all like Longfellow and Byron. Old boys. Europe. And rhymed
bellyachin' about hard luck. But these books--they're me." Very
carefully: "No; they're I! And she gave 'em to me! I will see her again!
But she won't know it. Now be sensible, son! What do you expect?
Oh--nothing. I'll just go on, and sneak in one more glimpse of her to
take back with me where I belong."
Half an hour after Claire had innocently passed his ambush, he began to
follow her. But not for days was he careless. If he saw her on the
horizon he paused until she was out of sight. That he might not fail her
in need, he bought a ridiculously expensive pair of field glasses, and
watched her when she stopped by the road. Once, when both her right rear
tire and the spare were punctured before she could make a town, Milt
from afar saw her patch a tube, pump up the tire in the dust. He ached
to go to her aid--though it cannot be said that hand-pumping was his
favorite July afternoon sport.
Lest he encounter her in the streets, he always camped to the eastward
of the town at which she spent the night. After dusk, when she was
likely to end the day's drive in the first sizable place, he hid his bug
in an alley and, like a spy after the papers, sneaked into each garage
to see if her car was there.
He would stroll in, look about vacuously, and pipe to the suspicious
night attendant, "Seen a traveling man named Smith?" Usually the garage
man snarled, "No, I ain't seen nobody named Smith. An'thing else I can
do for you?" But once he was so unlucky as to find the long-missing Mr.
Smith!
Mr. Smith was surprised and insistent. Milt had to do some quick lying.
During that interview the cement floor felt very hard under his
fidgeting feet, and he thought he heard the garage man in the office
telephoning, "Don't think he knows Smith at all. I got a hunch he's that
auto thief that was through here last summer."
When Claire did not stop in the first town she reached after twilight,
but drove on by dark, he had to do some perilous galloping to catch up.
The lights of a Teal are excellent for adornment, but they have no
relation to illumination. They are dependent upon a magneto which is
dependent only upon faith.
Once, skittering along by dark, he realized that the halted car which he
had just passed was the Gomez. He thought he heard a shout behind him,
but in a panic he kept going.
To the burring motor he groaned, "Now I probably never will see her
again. Except that she thinks I'm such a pest that I dassn't let her
know I'm in the same state, I sure am one successful lover. As a Prince
Charming I win the Vanderbilt Cup. I'm going ahead backwards so fast
I'll probably drop off into the Atlantic over the next hill!"
CHAPTER IX
THE MAN WITH AGATE EYES
When her car had crossed the Missouri River on the swing-ferry between
Bismarck and Mandan, Claire had passed from Middle West to Far West. She
came out on an upland of virgin prairie, so treeless and houseless, so
divinely dipping, so rough of grass, that she could imagine buffaloes
still roving. In a hollow a real prairie schooner was camped, and the
wandering homestead-seekers were cooking dinner beside it. From a quilt
on the hay in the wagon a baby peeped, and Claire's heart leaped.
Beyond was her first butte, its sharp-cut sides glittering yellow, and
she fancied that on it the Sioux scout still sat sentinel, erect on his
pony, the feather bonnet down his back.
Now she seemed to breathe deeper, see farther. Again she came from
unbroken prairie into wheat country and large towns.
Her impression of the new land was not merely of sun-glaring breadth.
Sometimes, on a cloudy day, the wash of wheatlands was as brown and
lowering and mysterious as an English moor in the mist. It dwarfed the
far-off houses by its giant enchantment; its brooding reaches changed
her attitude of brisk, gas-driven efficiency into a melancholy that was
full of hints of old dark beauty.
Even when the sun came out, and the land was brazenly optimistic, she
saw more than just prosperity. In a new home, house and barn and
windmill square-cornered and prosaic, plumped down in a field with wheat
coming up to the unporticoed door, a habitation unshadowed, unsheltered,
unsoftened, she found a frank cleanness, as though the inhabitants
looked squarely out at life, unafraid. She felt that the keen winds
ought to blow away from such a prairie-fronting post of civilization all
mildew and cowardice, all the mummy dust of ancient fears.
These were not peasants, these farmers. Nor, she learned, were they the
"hicks" of humor. She could never again encounter without fiery
resentment the Broadway peddler's faith that farmers invariably say
"Waal, by heck." For she had spent an hour talking to one Dakota farmer,
genial-eyed, quiet of speech. He had explained the relation of alfalfa
to soil-chemistry; had spoken of his daughter, who taught economics in a
state university; and asked Mr. Boltwood how turbines were hitched up on
liners.
In fact, Claire learned that there may be an almost tolerable state of
existence without gardenias or the news about the latest Parisian
imagists.
She dropped suddenly from the vast, smooth-swelling miles of wheatland
into the tortured marvels of the Bad Lands, and the road twisted in the
shadow of flying buttresses and the terraced tombs of maharajas. While
she tried to pick her way through a herd of wild, arroyo-bred cattle,
she forgot her maneuvering as she was startled by the stabbing scarlet
of a column of rock marking the place where for months deep beds of
lignite had burned.
Claire had often given lifts to tramping harvesters and even hoboes
along the road; had enjoyed the sight of their duffle-bags stuck up
between the sleek fenders and the hood, and their talk about people and
crops along the road, as they hung on the running-board. In the country
of long hillslopes and sentinel buttes between the Dakota Bad Lands and
Miles City she stopped to shout to a man whose plodding heavy back
looked fagged, "Want a ride?"
"Sure! You bet!"
Usually her guests stepped on the right-hand running-board, beside Mr.
Boltwood, and this man was far over on the right side of the road. But,
while she waited, he sauntered in front of the car, round to her side,
mounted beside her. Before the car had started, she was sorry to have
invited him. He looked her over grinningly, almost contemptuously. His
unabashed eyes were as bright and hard as agates. Below them, his nose
was twisted a little, his mouth bent insolently up at one corner, and
his square long chin bristled.
Usually, too, her passengers waited for her to start the conversation,
and talked at Mr. Boltwood rather than directly to her. But the bristly
man spat at her as the car started, "Going far?"
"Ye-es, some distance."
"Expensive car?"
"Why----"
"'Fraid of getting held up?"
"I hadn't thought about it."
"Pack a cannon, don't you?"
"I don't think I quite understand."
"Cannon! Gun! Revolver! Got a revolver, of course?"
"W-why, no." She spoke uncomfortably. She was aware that his twinkling
eyes were on her throat. His look made her feel unclean. She tried to
think of some question which would lead the conversation to the less
exclamatory subject of crops. They were on a curving shelf road beside a
shallow valley. The road was one side of a horseshoe ten miles long. The
unprotected edge of it dropped sharply to fields forty or fifty feet
below.
"Prosperous-looking wheat down there," she said.
"No. Not a bit!" His look seemed to add, "And you know it--unless you're
a fool!"
"Well, I didn't----"
"Make Glendive tonight?"
"At least that far."
"Say, lady, how's the chance for borrowin' a couple of dollars? I was
workin' for a Finnski back here a ways, and he did me dirt--holdin' out
my wages on me till the end of the month."
"Why, uh----"
It was Claire, not the man, who was embarrassed.
He was snickering, "Come on, don't be a tightwad. Swell car--poor man
with no eats, not even a two-bits flop for tonight. Could yuh loosen up
and slip me just a couple bones?"
Mr. Boltwood intervened. He looked as uncomfortable as Claire. "We'll
see. It's rather against my principles to give money to an able-bodied
man like you, even though it is a pleasure to give you a ride----"
"Sure! Don't cost you one red cent!"
"--and if I could help you get a job, though of course---- Being a
stranger out here---- Seems strange to me, though," Mr. Boltwood
struggled on, "that a strong fellow like you should be utterly
destitute, when I see all these farmers able to have cars----"
Their guest instantly abandoned his attitude of supplication for one of
boasting: "Destitute? Who the hell said I was destitute, heh?" He was
snarling across Claire at Mr. Boltwood. His wet face was five inches
from hers. She drew her head as far back as she could. She was sure that
the man completely appreciated her distaste, for his eyes popped with
amusement before he roared on:
"I got plenty of money! Just 'cause I'm hoofin' it---- I don't want no
charity from nobody! I could buy out half these Honyockers! I don't need
none of no man's money!" He was efficiently working himself into a rage.
"Who you calling destitute? All I wanted was an advance till pay day!
Got a check coming. You high-tone, kid-glove Eastern towerists want to
watch out who you go calling destitute. I bet I make a lot more money
than a lot of your four-flushin' friends!"
Claire wondered if she couldn't stop the car now, and tell him to get
off. But--that snapping eye was too vicious. Before he got off he would
say things--scarring, vile things, that would never heal in her brain.
Her father was murmuring, "Let's drop him," but she softly lied, "No.
His impertinence amuses me."
She drove on, and prayed that he would of himself leave his uncharitable
hosts at the next town.
The man was storming--with a very meek ending: "I'm tellin' you! I can
make money anywhere! I'm a crack machinist.... Give me two-bits for a
meal, anyway."
Mr. Boltwood reached in his change pocket. He had no quarter. He pulled
out a plump bill-fold. Without looking at the man, Claire could vision
his eyes glistening and his chops dripping as he stared at the hoard.
Mr. Boltwood handed him a dollar bill. "There, take that, and let's
change the subject," said Mr. Boltwood testily.
"All right, boss. Say, you haven't got a cartwheel instead of this
wrapping paper, have you? I like to feel my money in my pocket."
"No, sir, I have not!"
"All right, boss. No bad feelin's!"
Then he ignored Mr. Boltwood. His eyes focused on Claire's face. To
steady himself on the running-board he had placed his left hand on the
side of the car, his right on the back of the seat. That right hand slid
behind her. She could feel its warmth on her back.
She burst out, flaring, "Kindly do not touch me!"
"Gee, did I touch you, girlie? Why, that's a shame!" he drawled, his
cracked broad lips turning up in a grin.
An instant later, as they skipped round a bend of the long, high-hung
shelf road, he pretended to sway dangerously on the running-board, and
deliberately laid his filthy hand on her shoulder. Before she could say
anything he yelped in mock-regret, "Love o' Mike! 'Scuse me, lady. I
almost fell off."
Quietly, seriously, Claire said, "No, that wasn't accidental. If you
touch me again, I'll stop the car and ask you to walk."
"Better do it now, dolly!" snapped Mr. Boltwood.
The man hooked his left arm about the side-post of the open
window-shield. It was a strong arm, a firm grip. He seized her left
wrist with his free hand. Though all the while his eyes grotesquely kept
their amused sparkle, and beside them writhed laughter-wrinkles, he
shouted hoarsely, "You'll stop hell!" His hand slid from her wrist to
the steering wheel. "I can drive this boat's well as you can. You make
one move to stop, and I steer her over---- Blooie! Down the bank!"
He did twist the front wheels dangerously near to the outer edge of the
shelf road. Mr. Boltwood gazed at the hand on the wheel. With a quick
breath Claire looked at the side of the road. If the car ran off, it
would shoot down forty feet ... turning over and over.
"Y-you wouldn't dare, because you'd g-go, too!" she panted.
"Well, dearuh, you just try any monkey business and you'll find out how
much I'll gggggggo-too! I'll start you down the joy-slope and jump off,
savvy? Take your foot off that clutch."
She obeyed.
"Pretty lil feet, ain't they, cutie! Shoes cost about twelve bucks, I
reckon. While a better man than you or old moldy-face there has to hit
the pike in three-dollar brogans. Sit down, yuh fool!"
This last to Mr. Boltwood, who had stood up, swaying with the car, and
struck at him. With a huge arm the man swept Mr. Boltwood back into the
seat, but without a word to her father, he continued to Claire:
"And keep your hand where it belongs. Don't go trying to touch that
switch. Aw, be sensible! What would you do if the car did stop? I could
blackjack you both before this swell-elegant vehickle lost momentum,
savvy? I don't want to pay out my good money to a lawyer on a charge
of--murder. Get me? Better take it easy and not worry." His hand was
constantly on the wheel. He had driven cars before. He was steering as
much as she. "When I get you up the road a piece I'm going to drive all
the cute lil boys and girls up a side trail, and take all of papa's
gosh-what-a-wad in the cunnin' potet-book, and I guess we'll kiss lil
daughter, and drive on, a-wavin' our hand politely, and let you suckers
walk to the next burg."
"You wouldn't dare! You wouldn't dare!"
"Dare? Huh! Don't make the driver laugh!"
"I'll get help!"
"Yep. Sure. Fact, there's a car comin' toward us. 'Bout a mile away I'd
make it, wouldn't you? Well, dollface, if you make one peep--over the
bank you go, both of you dead as a couplin'-pin. Smeared all over those
rocks. Get me? And me--I'll be sorry the regrettable accident was so
naughty and went and happened--and I just got off in time meself. And
I'll pinch papa's poke while I'm helping get out the bodies!"
Till now she hadn't believed it. But she dared not glance at the
approaching car. It was their interesting guest who steered the Gomez
past the other; and he ran rather too near the edge of the road ... so
that she looked over, down.
Beaming, he went on, "I'd pull the rough stuff right here, instead of
wastin' my time as a cap'n of industry by taking you up to see the
scenery in that daisy little gully off the road; but the whole world can
see us along here--the hicks in the valley and anybody that happens to
sneak along in a car behind us. Shame the way this road curves--see too
far along it. Fact, you're giving me a lot of trouble. But you'll give
me a kiss, won't you, Gwendolyn?"
He bent down, chuckling. She could feel his bristly chin touch her
cheek. She sprang up, struck at him. He raised his hand from the wheel.
For a second the car ran without control. He jabbed her back into the
seat with his elbow. "Don't try any more monkey-shines, if you know
what's good for you," he said, quite peacefully, as he resumed steering.
She was in a haze, conscious only of her father's hand fondling hers.
She heard a quick pit-pit-pit-pit behind them. Car going to pass? She'd
have to let it go by. She'd concentrate on finding something she
could----
Then, "Hello, folks. Having a picnic? Who's your little friend in the
rompers?" sang out a voice beside them. It was Milt Daggett--the Milt
who must be scores of miles ahead. His bug had caught up with them, was
running even with them on the broad road.
CHAPTER X
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE HILLSIDE ROAD
So unexpectedly, so genially, that Claire wondered if he realized what
was happening, Milt chuckled to the tough on the running-board, as the
two cars ran side by side, "Bound for some place, brother?"
The unwelcome guest looked puzzled. For the first time his china eyes
ceased twinkling; and he answered dubiously: "Just gettin' a lift." He
sped up the car with the hand-throttle. Milt accelerated equally.
Claire roused; wanted to shout. She was palsied afraid that Milt would
leave them. The last time she had seen him, she had suggested that
leaving them would be a favor.
Her guest growled at her--the words coming through a slit at the corner
of his rowdy mouth, "Sit still, or I'll run you over."
Milt innocently babbled on, "Better come ride with me, bo'. More room in
this-here handsome coupelet."
Then was the rough relieved in his uneasy tender little heart, and his
eyes flickered again as he shouted back, not looking at Milt, "Thanks,
bub, I'll stick by me friends."
"Oh no; can't lose pleasure of your company. I like your looks. You're a
bloomin' little island way off on the dim silver skyline." Claire
knitted her brows. She had not seen Milt's rhetoric. "You're an island
of Hesperyds or Hesperides. Accent on the bezuzus. Oh, yes, moondream, I
think you better come. Haven't decided"--Milt's tone was bland--"whether
to kill you or just have you pinched. Miss Boltwood! Switch off your
power!"
"If she does," the tough shouted, "I'll run 'em off the bank."
"No, you won't, sweetheart, 'cause why? 'Cause what'll I do to you
afterwards?"
"You won't do nothin', Jack, 'cause I'd gouge your eyes out."
"Why, lovesoul, d' you suppose I'd be talking up as brash as this to a
bid, stwong man like oo if I didn't have a gun handy?"
"Yuh, I guess so, lil sunbeam. And before you could shoot, I'd crowd
your tin liz into the bank, and jam right into it! I may get killed, but
you won't even be a grease-spot!"
He was turning the Gomez from its straight course, forcing Milt's bug
toward the high bank of earth which walled in the road on the left.
While Claire was very sick with fear, then more sick with contempt, Milt
squealed, "You win!" And he had dropped back. The Gomez was going on
alone.
There was only one thing more for Claire--to jump. And that meant death.
The tough was storming, "Your friend's a crack shot--with his mouth!"
The thin pit-pit-pit was coming again. She looked back. She saw Milt's
bug snap forward so fast that on a bump its light wheels were in the
air. She saw Milt standing on the right side of the bug holding the
wheel with one hand, and the other hand--firm, grim, broad-knuckled
hand--outstretched toward the tough, then snatching at his collar.
The tough's grip was torn from the steering wheel. He was yanked from
the running-board. He crunched down on the road.
She seized the wheel. She drove on at sixty miles an hour. She had gone
a good mile before she got control of her fear and halted. She saw Milt
turn his little car as though it were a prancing bronco. It seemed to
paw the air with its front wheels. He shot back, pursuing the late
guest. The man ran bobbing along the road. At this distance he was no
longer formidable, but a comic, jerking, rabbity figure, humping himself
over the back track.
As the bug whirled down on him, the tough was to be seen throwing up his
hands, leaping from the high bank.
Milt turned again and came toward them, but slowly; and after he had
drawn up even and switched off the engine, he snatched off his violent
plaid cap and looked apologetic.
"Sorry I had to kid him along. I was afraid he really would drive you
off the bank. He was a bad actor. And he was right; he could have licked
me. Thought maybe I could jolly him into getting off, and have him
pinched, next town."
"But you had a gun--a revolver--didn't you, lad?" panted Mr. Boltwood.
"Um, wellllll---- I've got a shotgun. It wouldn't take me more 'n five
or ten minutes to dig it out, and put it together. And there's some
shells. They may be all right. Haven't looked at 'em since last fall.
They didn't get so awful damp then."
"But suppose he'd had a revolver himself?" wailed Claire.
"Gee, you know, I thought he probably did have one. I was scared blue. I
had a wrench to throw at him though," confided Milt.
"How did you know we needed you?"
"Why back there, couple miles behind you, maybe I saw your father get up
and try to wrestle him, so I suspected there was kind of a disagreement.
Say, Miss Boltwood, you know when you spoke to me--way back there--I
hadn't meant to butt in. Honest. I thought maybe as we were going----"
"Oh, I know!"
"--the same way, you wouldn't mind my trailing, if I didn't sit in too
often; and I thought maybe I could help you if----"
"Oh, I know! I'm so ashamed! So bitterly ashamed! I just meant---- Will
you forgive me? You were so good, taking care of us----"
"Oh, sure, that's all right!"
"I fancy you do know how grateful father and I are that you were behind
us, this time! Wasn't it a lucky accident that we'd slipped past you
some place!"
"Yes," dryly, "quite an accident. Well, I'll skip on ahead again. May
run into you again before we hit Seattle. Going to take the run through
Yellowstone Park?"
"Yes, but----" began Claire. Her father interrupted:
"Uh, Mr., uh--Daggett, was it?--I wonder if you won't stay a little
closer to us hereafter? I was getting rather a good change out of the
trip, but I'm afraid that now---- If it wouldn't be an insult, I'd beg
you to consider staying with us for a consideration, uh, you know,
remuneration, and you could----"
"Thanks, uh, thank you, sir, but I wouldn't like to do it. You see, it's
kind of my vacation. If I've done anything I'm tickled----"
"But perhaps," Mr. Boltwood ardently begged the young man recently so
abysmally unimportant, "perhaps you would consent to being my guest,
when you cared to--say at hotels in the Park."
"'Fraid I couldn't. I'm kind of a lone wolf."
"Please! Pretty please!" besought Claire. Her smile was appealing, her
eyes on his.
Milt bit his knuckles. He looked weak. But he persisted, "No, you'll get
over this scrap with our friend. By the way, I'll put the deputy onto
him, in the next town. He'll never get out of the county. When you
forget him---- Oh no, you can go on fine. You're a good steady driver,
and the road's perfectly safe--if you give people the once-over before
you pick 'em up. Picking up badmen is no more dangerous here than it
would be in New York. Fact, there's lot more hold-ups in any city than
in the wildest country. I don't think you showed such awfully good taste
in asking Terrible Tim, the two-gun man, right into the parlor. Gee,
please don't do it again! Please!"
"No," meekly. "I was an idiot. I'll be good, next time. But won't you
stay somewhere near us?"
"I'd like to, but I got to chase on. Don't want to wear out the welcome
on the doormat, and I'm due in Seattle, and---- Say, Miss Boltwood." He
swung out of the bug, cranked up, climbed back, went awkwardly on, "I
read those books you gave me. They're slick--mean to say, interesting.
Where that young fellow in _Youth's Encounter_ wanted to be a bishop and
a soldier and everything---- Just like me, except Schoenstrom is
different, from London, some ways! I always wanted to be a brakie, and
then a yeggman. But I wasn't bright enough for either. I just became a
garage man. And I---- Some day I'm going to stop using slang. But it'll
take an operation!"
He was streaking down the road, and Claire was sobbing, "Oh, the lamb,
the darling thing! Fretting about his slang, when he wasn't afraid in
that horrible nightmare. If we could just do something for him!"
"Don't you worry about him, dolly. He's a very energetic chap. And----
Uh---- Mightn't we drive on a little farther, perhaps? I confess that
the thought of our recent guest still in this vicinity----"
"Yes, and---- Oh, I'm shameless. If Mohammed Milton won't stay with our
car mountain, we're going to tag after him."
But when she reached the next hill, with its far shining outlook, there
was no Milt and no Teal bug on the road ahead.
CHAPTER XI
SAGEBRUSH TOURISTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY
She had rested for two days in Miles City; had seen the horse-market,
with horse-wranglers in chaps; had taken dinner with army people at Fort
Keogh, once the bulwark against the Sioux, now nodding over the dry
grass on its parade ground.
By the Yellowstone River, past the Crow reservation, Claire had driven
on through the Real West, along the Great Highway. The Red Trail and the
Yellowstone Trail had joined now and she was one of the new Canterbury
Pilgrims. Even Mr. Boltwood caught the trick of looking for licenses,
and cried, "There's a Connecticut car!"
To the Easterner, a drive from New York to Cape Cod, over asphalt, is
viewed as heroic, but here were cars that had casually started on
thousand-mile vacations. She kept pace not only with large cars touring
from St. Louis or Detroit to Glacier Park and Yellowstone, but also she
found herself companionable with families of workmen, headed for a new
town and a new job, and driving because a flivver, bought second-hand
and soon to be sold again, was cheaper than trains.
"Sagebrush Tourists" these camping adventurers were called. Claire
became used to small cars, with curtain-lights broken, bearing
wash-boilers or refrigerators on the back, pasteboard suitcases lashed
by rope to the running-board, frying pans and canvas water bottles
dangling from top-rods. And once baby's personal laundry was seen
flapping on a line across a tonneau!
In each car was what looked like the crowd at a large
farm-auction--grandfather, father, mother, a couple of sons and two or
three daughters, at least one baby in the arms of each grown-up, all
jammed into two seats already filled with trunks and baby-carriages. And
they were happy--incredibly happier than the smart people being conveyed
in a bored way behind chauffeurs.
The Sagebrush Tourists made camp; covered the hood with a quilt from
which the cotton was oozing; brought out the wash-boiler, did a washing,
had dinner, sang about the fire; granther and the youngest baby
gamboling together, while the limousinvalids, insulated from life by
plate glass, preserved by their steady forty an hour from the commonness
of seeing anything along the road, looked out at the campers for a
second, sniffed, rolled on, wearily wondering whether they would find a
good hotel that night--and why the deuce they hadn't come by train.
If Claire Boltwood had been protected by Jeff Saxton or by a chauffeur,
she, too, would probably have marveled at cars gray with dust, the
unshaved men in fleece-lined duck coats, and the women wind-burnt
beneath the boudoir caps they wore as motoring bonnets. But Claire knew
now that filling grease-cups does not tend to delicacy of hands; that
when you wash with a cake of petrified pink soap and half a pitcher of
cold hard water, you never quite get the stain off--you merely get
through the dust stratum to the Laurentian grease formation, and mutter,
"a nice clean grease doesn't hurt food," and go sleepily down to dinner.
She saw a dozen camping devices unknown to the East: trailers, which by
day bobbed along behind the car like coffins on two wheels, but at night
opened into tents with beds, an ice-box, a table; tents covering a bed
whose head rested on the running-board; beds made-up in the car, with
the cushions as mattresses.
The Great Transcontinental Highway was colored not by motors alone. It
is true that the Old West of the stories is almost gone; that Billings,
Miles City, Bismarck, are more given to Doric banks than to gambling
hells. But still are there hints of frontier days. Still trudge the
prairie schooners; cowpunchers in chaps still stand at the doors of log
cabins--when they are tired of playing the automatic piano; and blanket
Indians, Blackfeet and Crows, stare at five-story buildings--when they
are not driving modern reapers on their farms.
They all waved to Claire. Telephone linemen, lolling with pipes and
climber-strapped legs in big trucks, sang out to her; traction engine
crews shouted; and these she found to be her own people. Only once did
she lose contentment--when, on the observation platform of a train bound
for Seattle, she saw a Britisher in flannels and a monocle, headed
perhaps for the Orient. As the train slipped silkenly away, the Gomez
seemed slow and clumsy, and the strain of driving intolerable. And that
Britisher must be charming---- Then a lonely, tight-haired woman in the
doorway of a tar-paper shack waved to her, and in that wistful gesture
Claire found friendship.
And sometimes in the "desert" of yet unbroken land she paused by the
Great Highway and forgot the passion to keep going----
She sat on a rock, by a river so muddy that it was like yellow milk. The
only trees were a bunch of cottonwoods untidily scattering shreds of
cotton, and the only other vegetation left in the dead world was
dusty green sagebrush with lumps of gray yet pregnant earth between,
or a few exquisite green and white flashes of the herb called
Snow-on-the-Mountain. The inhabitants were jackrabbits, or American
magpies in sharp black and white livery, forever trying to balance their
huge tails against the wind, and yelling in low-magpie their opinion of
tourists.
She did not desire gardens, then, nor the pettiness of plump terraced
hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to
it by her own plodding. Her soul--if she hadn't had one, it would
immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, the moment she
sat there--sailed with the hawks in the high thin air, and when it came
down it sang hallelujahs, because the sagebrush fragrance was more
healing than piney woods, because the sharp-bitten edges of the buttes
were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise, and because a real person,
one Milt Daggett, though she would never see him again, had found her
worthy of worship.
She did not often think of Milt; she did not know whether he was ahead
of her, or had again dropped behind. When she did recall him, it was
with respect quite different from the titillation that dancing men had
sometimes aroused, or the impression of manicured agreeableness and
efficiency which Jeff Saxton carried about.
She always supplicated the mythical Milt in moments of tight driving.
Driving, just the actual getting on, was her purpose in life, and the
routine of driving was her order of the day: Morning freshness, rolling
up as many miles as possible before lunch, that she might loaf
afterward. The invariable two P.M. discovery that her eyes ached, and
the donning of huge amber glasses, which gave to her lithe smartness a
counterfeit scholarliness. Toward night, the quarter-hour of level
sun-glare which prevented her seeing the road. Dusk, and the discovery
of how much light there was after all, once she remembered to take off
her glasses. The worst quarter-hour when, though the roads were an
amethyst rich to the artist, they were also a murkiness exasperating to
the driver, yet still too light to be thrown into relief by the lamps.
The mystic moment when night clicked tight, and the lamps made a fan of
gold, and Claire and her father settled down to plodding content--and no
longer had to take the trouble of admiring the scenery!
The morning out of Billings, she wondered why a low cloud so
persistently held its shape, and realized that it was a far-off
mountain, her first sight of the Rockies. Then she cried out, and wished
for Milt to share her exultation. Rather earnestly she said to Mr.
Boltwood:
"The mountains must be so wonderful to Mr. Daggett, after spending his
life in a cornfield. Poor Milt! I hope----"
"I don't think you need to worry about that young man. I fancy he's
quite able to run about by himself, as jolly as a sand-dog. And---- Of
course I'm extremely grateful to him for his daily rescue of us from the
jaws of death, but he was right; if he had stayed with us, it would have
been inconvenient to keep considering him. He isn't accustomed to the
comedy of manners----"
"He ought to be. He'd enjoy it so. He's the real American. He has
imagination and adaptability. It's a shame: all the _petits fours_ and
Bach recitals wasted on Jeff Saxton, when a Milt Dag----"
"Yes, yes, quite so!"
"No, honest! The dear honey-lamb, so ingenious, and really, rather
good-looking. But so lonely and gregarious--like a little woolly dog
that begs you to come and play; and I slapped him when he patted his
paws and gamboled---- It was horrible. I'll never forgive myself. Making
him drive on ahead in that nasty, patronizing way---- I feel as if we'd
spoiled his holiday. I wonder if he had intended to make the Yellowstone
Park trip? He didn't----"
"Yes, yes. Let's forget the young man. Look! How very curious!"
They were crossing a high bridge over a railroad track along which a
circus train was bending. Mr. Boltwood offered judicious remarks upon
the migratory habits of circuses, and the vision of the Galahad of the
Teal bug was thoroughly befogged by parental observations, till Claire
returned from youthful romance to being a sensible Boltwood, and decided
that after all, Milt was not a lord of the sky-painted mountains.
Before they bent south, at Livingston, Claire had her first mountain
driving, and once she had to ford a stream, putting the car at it,
watching the water curve up in a lovely silver veil. She felt that she
was conquering the hills as she had the prairies.
She pulled up on a plateau to look at her battery. She noted the edge of
a brake-band peeping beyond the drum, in a ragged line of fabric and
copper wire. Then she knew that she didn't know enough to conquer. "Do
you suppose it's dangerous?" she asked her father, who said a lot of
comforting things that didn't mean anything.
She thought of Milt. She stopped a passing car. The driver "guessed"
that the brake-band was all gone, and that it would be dangerous to
continue with it along mountain roads. Claire dustily tramped two miles
to a ranch house, and telephoned to the nearest garage, in a town called
Saddle Back.
Whenever a motorist has delirium he mutters those lamentable words,
"Telephoned to the nearest garage."
She had to wait a tedious hour before she saw a flivver rattling up with
the garage man, who wasn't a man at all, but a fourteen-year-old boy. He
snorted, "Rats, you didn't need to send for me. Could have made it
perfectly safe. Come on."
Never has the greatest boy pianist received such awe as Claire gave to
this contemptuous young god, with grease on his peachy cheeks. She did
come on. But she rather hoped that she was in great danger. It was
humiliating to telephone to a garage for nothing. When she came into the
gas-smelling garage in Saddle Back she said appealingly to the man in
charge, a serious, lip-puffing person of forty-five, "Was it safe to
come in with the brake-band like that?"
"No. Pretty risky. Wa'n't it, Mike?"
The Mike to whom he turned for authority was the same fourteen-year-old
boy. He snapped, "Heh? That? Naw! Put in new band. Get busy. Bring me
the jack. Hustle up, uncle."
While the older man stood about and vainly tried to impress people who
came in and asked questions which invariably had to be referred to his
repair boy, the precocious expert stripped the wheel down to something
that looked to Claire distressingly like an empty milk-pan. Then the boy
didn't seem to know exactly what to do. He scratched his ear a good
deal, and thought deeply. The older man could only scratch.
So for two hours Claire and her father experienced that most distressing
of motor experiences--waiting, while the afternoon that would have been
so good for driving went by them. Every fifteen minutes they came in
from sitting on a dry-goods box in front of the garage, and never did
the repair appear to be any farther along. The boy seemed to be giving
all his time to getting the wrong wrench, and scolding the older man for
having hidden the right one.
When she had left Brooklyn Heights, Claire had not expected to have such
authoritative knowledge of the Kalifornia Kandy Kitchen, Saddle Back,
Montana, across from Tubbs' Garage, that she could tell whether they
were selling more Atharva Cigarettes or Polutropons. She prowled about
the garage till she knew every pool of dripped water in the tin pail of
soft soap in the iron sink.
She was worried by an overheard remark of the boy wonder, "Gosh, we
haven't any more of that decent brake lining. Have to use this piece of
mush." But when the car was actually done, nothing like a dubious brake
could have kept her from the glory of starting. The first miles seemed
miracles of ease and speed.
She came through the mountains into Livingston.
Kicking his heels on a fence near town, and fondling a gray cat, sat
Milt Daggett, and he yelped at her with earnestness and much noise.
CHAPTER XII
THE WONDERS OF NATURE WITH ALL MODERN IMPROVEMENTS
"Hello!" said Milt.
"Hel-lo!" said Claire.
"How dee do," said Mr. Boltwood.
"This is so nice! Where's your car? I hope nothing's happened," glowed
Claire.
"No. It's back here from the road a piece. Camp there tonight. Reason I
stopped---- Struck me you've never done any mountain driving, and
there's some pretty good climbs in the Park; slick road, but we go up to
almost nine thousand feet. And cold mornings. Thought I'd tip you off to
some driving tricks--if you'd like me to."
"Oh, of course. Very grateful----"
"Then I'll tag after you tomorrow, and speak my piece."
"So jolly you're going through the Park."
"Yes, thought might as well. What the guide books call 'Wonders of
Nature.' Only wonder of nature I ever saw in Schoenstrom was my friend
Mac trying to think he was soused after a case of near-beer. Well----
See you tomorrow."
Not once had he smiled. His tone had been impersonal. He vaulted the
fence and tramped away.
When they drove out of town, in the morning, they found Milt waiting by
the road, and he followed them till noon. By urgent request, he shared a
lunch, and lectured upon going down long grades in first or second
speed, to save brakes; upon the use of the retarded spark and the
slipped clutch in climbing. His bug was beside the Gomez in the line-up
at the Park gate, when the United States Army came to seal one's
firearms, and to inquire on which mountain one intended to be killed by
defective brakes. He was just behind her all the climb up to Mammoth Hot
Springs.
When she paused for water to cool the boiling radiator, the bug panted
up, and with the first grin she had seen on his face since Dakota Milt
chuckled, "The Teal is a grand car for mountains. Aside from
overheating, bum lights, thin upholstery, faulty ignition, tissue-paper
brake-bands, and this-here special aviation engine, specially built for
a bumble-bee, it's what the catalogues call a powerful brute!"
Claire and her father stayed at the chain of hotels through the Park.
Milt was always near them, but not at the hotels. He patronized one of
the chains of permanent camps.
The Boltwoods invited him to dinner at one hotel, but he refused and----
* * * * *
Because he was afraid that Claire would find him intrusive, Milt was
grave in her presence. He couldn't respond either to her enthusiasm
about canyon and colored pool--or to her rage about the tourists who,
she alleged, preferred freak museum pieces to plain beauty; who never
admired a view unless it was labeled by a signpost and megaphoned by a
guide as something they ought to admire--and tell the Folks Back Home
about.
When she tried to express this social rage to Milt he merely answered
uneasily, "Yes, I guess there's something to that."
She was, he pondered, so darn particular. How could he ever figure out
what he ought to do? No thanks; much obliged, but guessed he'd better
not accept her invitation to dinner. Darn sorry couldn't come but----
Had promised a fellow down at the camp to have chow with him.
If in this Milt was veracious, he was rather fickle to his newly
discovered friend; for while Claire was finishing dinner, a solemn young
man was watching her through a window.
She was at a table for six. She was listening to a man of thirty in
riding-breeches, a stock, and a pointed nose, who bowed to her every
time he spoke, which was so frequently that his dining gave the
impression of a man eating grape-fruit on a merry-go-round. Back in
Schoenstrom, fortified by Mac and the bunch at the Old Home Lunch, Milt
would have called the man a "dude," and--though less noisily than the
others--would have yelped, "Get onto Percy's beer-bottle pants. What's
he got his neck bandaged for? Bet he's got a boil."
But now Milt yearned, "He does look swell. Wish I could get away with
those things. Wouldn't I look like a fool with my knees buttoned up,
though! And there's two other fellows in dress suits. Wouldn't mind
those so much. Gee, it must be awful where you've got so many suits of
trick clothes you don't know which one to wear.
"That fellow and Claire are talking pretty swift. He doesn't need any
piston rings, that lad. Wonder--wonder what they're talking about?
Music, I guess, and books and pictures and scenery. He's saying that no
tongue or pen can describe the glories of the Park, and then he's trying
to describe 'em. And maybe they know the same folks in New York. Lord,
how I'd be out of it. I wish----"
Milt made a toothpick out of a match, decided that toothpicks were
inelegant in his tragic mood, and longed: "Never did see her among her
own kind of folks till now. I wish I could jabber about music and stuff.
I'll learn it. I will! I can! I picked up autos in three months. I----
Milt, you're a dub. I wonder can they be talking French, maybe, or Wop,
or something? I could get onto the sedan styles in highbrow talk as long
as it was in American.
"I could probably spring linen-collar stuff about, 'Really a delightful
book, so full of delightful characters,' if I stuck by the rhetoric
books long enough. But once they begin the _parlez-vous, oui, oui_, I'm
a gone goose. Still, by golly, didn't I pick up Dutch--German--like a
mice? Back off, son! You did not! You can talk Plattdeutsch something
grand, as long as you keep the verbs and nouns in American. You got a
nice character, Milt, but you haven't got any parts of speech.
"Now look at Percy! Taking a bath in a finger-bowl. I never could pull
that finger-bowl stuff; pinning your ears back and jiu-jitsing the fried
chicken, and then doing a high dive into a little dish that ain't--that
isn't either a wash-bowl or real good lemonade. He's a perfect lady,
Percy is. Dabs his mouth with his napkin like a watchmaker tinkering the
carburetor in a wrist watch.
"Lookit him bow and scrape--asking her something---- Rats, he's going
out in the lobby with her. Walks like a cat on a wet ash-pile. But----
Oh thunder, he's all right. Neat. I never could mingle with that bunch.
I'd be web-footed and butter-fingered. And he seems to know all that
bunch--bows to every maiden aunt in the shop. Now if I was following
her, I'd never see anybody but her; rest of the folks could all bob
their heads silly, and I'd never see one blame thing except that funny
little soft spot at the back of her neck. Nope, you're kind to your
cat, Milt, but you weren't cut out to be no parlor-organ duet."
This same meditative young man might have been discovered walking past
the porch of the hotel, his hands in his pockets, his eyes presumably on
the stars--certainly he gave no signs of watching Claire and the man in
riding-breeches as they leaned over the rail, looked at mountain-tops
filmy in starlight, while in the cologne-atomized mode, Breeches quoted:
Ah, 'tis far heaven my awed heart seeks
When I behold those mighty peaks.
Milt could hear him commenting, "Doesn't that just get the feeling of
the great open, Miss Boltwood?"
Milt did not catch her answer. Himself, he grunted, "I never could get
much het up about this poetry that's full of Ah's and 'tises."
Claire must have seen Milt just after he had sauntered past. She cried,
"Oh, Mr. Daggett! Just a moment!" She left Breeches, ran down to Milt.
He was frightened. Was he going to get what he deserved for
eavesdropping?
She was almost whispering. "Save me from our friend up on the porch,"
she implored.
He couldn't believe it. But he took a chance. "Won't you have a little
walk?" he roared.
"So nice of you--just a little way, perhaps?" she sang out.
They were silent till he got up the nerve to admire, "Glad you found
some people you knew in the hotel."
"But I didn't."
"Oh, I thought your friend in the riding-pants was chummy."
"So did I!" She rather snorted.
"Well, he's a nice-looking lad. I did admire those pants. I never could
wear anything like that."
"I should hope not--at dinner! The creepy jack-ass, I don't believe he's
ever been on a horse in his life! He thinks riding-breeches are the----"
"Oh, that's it. Breeches, not pants."
"--last word in smartness. Overdressing is just ten degrees worse than
underdressing."
"Oh, I don't know. Take this sloppy old blue suit of mine----"
"It's perfectly nice and simple, and quite well cut. You probably had a
clever tailor."
"I had. He lives in Chicago or New York, I believe."
"Really? How did he come to Schoenstrom?"
"Never been there. This tailor is a busy boy. He fitted about eleventeen
thousand people, last year."
"I see. Ready mades. Cheer up. That's where Henry B. Boltwood gets most
of his clothes. Mr. Daggett, if ever I catch you in the
Aren't-I-beautiful frame of mind of our friend back on the porch, I'll
give up my trip to struggle for your soul."
"He seemed to have soul in large chunks. He seemed to talk pretty
painlessly. I had a hunch you and he were discussing sculpture, anyway.
Maybe Rodin."
"What do you know about Rodin?"
"Articles in the magazines. Same place you learned about him!" But Milt
did not sound rude. He said it chucklingly.
"You're perfectly right. And we've probably read the very same articles.
Well, our friend back there said to me at dinner, 'It must be dreadful
for you to have to encounter so many common people along the road.' I
said, 'It is,' in the most insulting tone I could, and he just rolled
his eyes, and hadn't an idea I meant him. Then he slickered his hair at
me, and mooed, 'Is it not wonderful to see all these strange
manifestations of the secrets of Nature!' and I said, 'Is it?' and he
went on, 'One feels that if one could but meet a sympathetic lady here,
one's cup of rejoicing in untrammeled nature----' Honest, Milt, Mr.
Daggett, I mean, he did talk like that. Been reading books by optimistic
lady authors. And one looked at me, one did, as if one would be willing
to hold my hand, if I let one.
"He invited me to come out on the porch and give the double O. to
handsome mountains as illuminated by terrestrial bodies, and I felt so
weak in the presence of his conceit that I couldn't refuse. Then he
insisted on introducing me to a woman from my own Brooklyn, who
condoled with me for having to talk to Western persons while motoring.
Oh, dear God, that such people should live ... that the sniffy little
Claire should once have been permitted to live!... And then I saw you!"
Through all her tirade they had stood close together, her face visibly
eager in the glow from the hotel; and Milt had grown taller. But he
responded, "I'm afraid I might have been just as bad. I haven't even
reached the riding-breeches stage in evolution. Maybe never will."
"No. You won't. You'll go right through it. By and by, when you're so
rich that father and I won't be allowed to associate with you, you'll
wear riding-breeches--but for riding, not as a donation to the beauties
of nature."
"Oh, I'm already rich. It shows. Waitress down at the camp asked me
whose car I was driving through."
"I know what I wanted to say. Since you won't be our guest, will you be
our host--I mean, as far as welcoming us? I think it would be fun for
father and me to stop at your camp, tomorrow night, at the canyon,
instead of at the hotel. Will you guide me to the canyon, if I do?"
"Oh--terribly--glad!"
CHAPTER XIII
ADVENTURERS BY FIRELIGHT
Neither of the Boltwoods had seen the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. The
Canyon of the Yellowstone was their first revelation of intimidating
depth and color gone mad. When their car and Milt's had been parked in
the palisaded corral back of the camp at which they were to stay, they
three set out for the canyon's edge chattering, and stopped dumb.
Mr. Boltwood declined to descend. He returned to the camp for a cigar.
The boy and girl crept down seeming miles of damp steps to an outhanging
pinnacle that still was miles of empty airy drop above the river bed.
Claire had a quaking feeling that this rock pulpit was going to slide.
She thrust out her hand, seized Milt's paw, and in its firm warmth found
comfort. Clinging to its security she followed him by the crawling path
to the river below. She looked up at columns of crimson and saffron and
burning brown, up at the matronly falls, up at lone pines clinging to
jutting rocks that must be already crashing toward her, and in the
splendor she knew the Panic fear that is the deepest reaction to
beauty.
Milt merely shook his head as he stared up. He had neither gossiped nor
coyly squeezed her hand as he had guided her. She fell to thinking that
she preferred this American boy in this American scene to a nimble
gentleman saluting the Alps in a dinky green hat with a little feather.
It was Milt who, when they had labored back up again, when they had sat
smiling at each other with comfortable weariness, made her see the
canyon not as a freak, but as the miraculous work of a stream rolling
grains of sand for millions of years, till it had cut this Jovian
intaglio. He seemed to have read--whether in books, or in paragraphs in
mechanical magazines--a good deal about geology. He made it real. Not
that she paid much attention to what he actually said! She was too busy
thinking of the fact that he should say it at all.
Not condescendingly but very companionably she accompanied Milt in the
exploration of their camp for the night--the big dining tent, the city
of individual bedroom tents, canvas-sided and wooden-floored, each with
a tiny stove for the cold mornings of these high altitudes. She was awed
that evening by hearing her waitress discussing the novels of Ibanez.
Jeff Saxton knew the names of at least six Russian novelists, but Jeff
was not highly authoritative regarding Spanish literature.
"I suppose she's a school-teacher, working here in vacation," Claire
whispered to Milt, beside her at the long, busy, scenically
conversational table.
"Our waitress? Well, sort of. I understand she's professor of literature
in some college," said Milt, in a matter of fact way. And he didn't at
all see the sequence when she went on:
"There is an America! I'm glad I've found it!"
The camp's evening bonfire was made of logs on end about a stake of
iron. As the logs blazed up, the guests on the circle of benches crooned
"Suwanee River," and "Old Black Joe," and Claire crooned with them. She
had been afraid that her father would be bored, but she saw that, above
his carefully tended cigar, he was dreaming. She wondered if there had
been a time when he had hummed old songs.
The fire sank to coals. The crowd wandered off to their tents. Mr.
Boltwood followed them after an apologetic, "Good night. Don't stay up
too late." With a scattering of only half a dozen people on the benches,
this huge circle seemed deserted; and Claire and Milt, leaning forward,
chins on hands, were alone--by their own campfire, among the mountains.
The stars stooped down to the hills; the pines were a wall of blackness;
a coyote yammered to point the stillness; and the mighty pile of coals
gave a warmth luxurious in the creeping mountain chill.
The silence of large places awes the brisk intruder, and Claire's voice
was unconsciously lowered as she begged, "Tell me something about
yourself, Mr. Daggett. I don't really know anything at all."
"Oh, you wouldn't be interested. Just Schoenstrom!"
"But just Schoenstrom might be extremely interesting."
"But honest, you'd think I was--edging in on you!"
"I know what you are thinking. The time I suggested, way back there in
Dakota, that you were sticking too close. You've never got over it. I've
tried to make up for it, but---- I really don't blame you. I was horrid.
I deserve being beaten. But you do keep on punishing ra----"
"Punishing? Lord, I didn't mean to! No! Honest! It was nothing. You were
right. Looked as though I was inviting myself---- But, oh, pleassssse,
Miss Boltwood, don't ever think for a sec. that I meant to be a
grouch----"
"Then do tell me---- Who is this Milton Daggett that you know so much
better than I ever can?"
"Well," Milt crossed his knees, caught his chin in his hand, "I don't
know as I really do know him so well. I thought I did. I was onto his
evil ways. He was the son of the pioneer doctor, Maine folks."
"Really? My mother came from Maine."
Milt did not try to find out that they were cousins. He went on, "This
kid, Milt, went to high school in St. Cloud--town twenty times as big
as Schoenstrom--but he drifted back because his dad was old and needed
him, after his mother's death----"
"You have no brothers or sisters?"
"No. Nobody. 'Cept Lady Vere de Vere--which animal she is going to get
cuffed if she chews up any more of my overcoat out in my tent
tonight!... Well, this kid worked 'round, machinery mostly, and got
interested in cars, and started a garage---- Wee, that was an awful
shop, first one I had! In Rauskukle's barn. Six wrenches and a
screwdriver and a one-lung pump! And I didn't know a roller-bearing from
three-point suspension! But---- Well, anyway, he worked along, and built
a regular garage, and paid off practically all the mortgage on it----"
"I remember stopping at a garage in Schoenstrom, I'm almost sure it was,
for something. I seem to remember it was a good place. Do you own it?
Really?"
"Ye-es, what there is of it."
"But there's a great deal of it. It's efficient. You've done your job.
That's more than most high-born aides-de-camp could say."
"Honestly? Well--I don't know----"
"Who did you play with in Schoenstrom? Oh, I _wish_ I'd noticed that
town. But I couldn't tell then that---- What, uh, which girl did you
fall in love with?"
"None! Honest! None! Not one! Never fell in love----"
"You're unfortunate. I have, lots of times. I remember quite enjoying
being kissed once, at a dance."
When he answered, his voice was strange: "I suppose you're engaged to
somebody."
"No. And I don't know that I shall be. Once, I thought I liked a man,
rather. He has nice eyes and the most correct spectacles, and he is
polite to his mother at breakfast, and his name is Jeff, and he will
undoubtedly be worth five or six hundred thousand dollars, some day, and
his opinions on George Moore and commercial paper are equally sound and
unoriginal---- Oh, I ought not to speak of him, and I certainly ought
not to be spiteful. I'm not at all reticent and ladylike, am I! But----
Somehow I can't see him out here, against a mountain of jagged rock."
"Only you won't always be out here against mountains. Some day you'll be
back in--where is it in New York State?"
"I confess it's Brooklyn--but not what you'd mean by Brooklyn. Your
remark shows you to have subtlety. I must remember that, mustn't I! I
won't always be driving through this big land. But---- Will I get all
fussy and ribbon-tied again, when I go back?"
"No. You won't. You drive like a man."
"What has that----"
"It has a lot to do with it. A garage man can trail along behind another
car and figger out, figure out, just about what kind of a person the
driver is from the way he handles his boat. Now you bite into the job.
You drive pretty neat--neatly. You don't either scoot too far out of the
road in passing a car, or take corners too wide. You won't be fussy. But
still, I suppose you'll be glad to be back among your own folks and
you'll forget the wild Milt that tagged along----"
"Milt--or Mr. Daggett--no, Milt! I shall never, in my oldest grayest
year, in a ducky cap by the fireplace, forget the half-second when your
hand came flashing along, and caught that man on the running-board. But
it wasn't just that melodrama. If that hadn't happened, something else
would have, to symbolize you. It's that you--oh, you took me in, a
stranger, and watched over me, and taught me the customs of the country,
and were never impatient. No, I shan't forget that; neither of the
Boltwoods will."
In the rose-haze of firelight he straightened up and stared at her, but
he settled into shyness again as she added:
"Perhaps others would have done the same thing. I don't know. If they
had, I should have remembered them too. But it happened that it was you,
and I, uh, my father and I, will always be grateful. We both hope we may
see you in Seattle. What are you planning to do there? What is your
ambition? Or is that a rude question?"
"Why, uh----"
"What I mean---- I mean, how did you happen to want to go there, with a
garage at home? You still control it?"
"Oh yes. Left my mechanic in charge. Why, I just kind of decided
suddenly. I guess it was what they call an inspiration. Always wanted a
long trip, anyway, and I thought maybe in Seattle I could hook up with
something a little peppier than Schoenstrom. Maybe something in Alaska.
Always wished I were a mechanical or civil engineer so----"
"Then why don't you become one? You're young---- How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"We're both children, compared with Je--compared with some men who are
my friends. You're quite young enough to go to engineering school. And
take some academic courses on the side--English, so on. Why don't you?
Have you ever thought of it?"
"N-no, I hadn't thought of doing it, but---- All right. I will! In
Seattle! B'lieve the University of Washington is there."
"You mean it?"
"Yes. I do. You're the boss."
"That's--that's flattering, but---- Do you always make up your mind as
quickly as this?"
"When the boss gives orders!"
He smiled, and she smiled back, but this time it was she who was
embarrassed. "You're rather overwhelming. You change your life--if you
really do mean it--because a _jeune fille_ from Brooklyn is so
impertinent, from her Olympian height of finishing-school learning, as
to suggest that you do so."
"I don't know what a _jeune fille_ is, but I do know----" He sprang up.
He did not look at her. He paraded back and forth, three steps to the
right, three to the left, his hands in his pockets, his voice
impersonal. "I know you're the finest person I ever met. You're the
kind--I knew there must be people like you, because I knew the Joneses.
They're the only friends I've got that have, oh, I suppose it's what
they call culture."
In a long monologue, uninterrupted by Claire, he told of his affection
for the Schoenstrom "prof" and his wife. The practical, slangy Milt of
the garage was lost in the enthusiastic undergraduate adoring his
instructor in the university that exists as veritably in a teacher's or
a doctor's sitting-room in every Schoenstrom as it does in certain
lugubrious stone hulks recognized by a state legislature as magically
empowered to paste on sacred labels lettered "Bachelor of Arts."
He broke from his revelations to plump down on the bench beside her, to
slap his palm with his fist, and sigh, "Lord, I've been gassing on!
Guess I bored you!"
"Oh, please, Milt, please! I see it all so---- It must have been
wonderful, the evening when Mrs. Jones read Noyes's 'Highwayman' aloud.
Tell me--long before that--were you terribly lonely as a little boy?"
Now Milt had not been a terribly lonely little boy. He had been a leader
in a gang devoted to fighting, swimming, pickerel-spearing,
beggie-stealing, and catching rides on freights.
But he believed that he was accurately presenting every afternoon of his
childhood, as he mused, "Yes, I guess I was, pretty much. I remember I
used to sit on dad's doorstep, all those long sleepy summer afternoons,
and I'd think, 'Aw, geeeeee, I--wisht--I--had--somebody--to--play--with!'
I always wanted to make-b'lieve Robin Hood, but none of the other
kids--so many of them were German; they didn't know about Robin Hood; so
I used to scout off alone."
"If I could only have been there, to be Maid Marian for you! We'd have
learned archery! Lonely little boy on the doorstep!" Her fingers just
touched his sleeve. In her gesture, the ember-light caught the crystal
of her wrist watch. She stooped to peer at it, and her pitying
tenderness broke off in an agitated: "Heavings! Is it that late? To bed!
Good night, Milt."
"Good night, Cl---- Miss Boltwood."
"No. 'Claire,' of course. I'm not normally a first-name-snatcher, but I
do seem to have fallen into saying 'Milt.' Night!"
As she undressed, in her tent, Claire reflected, "He won't take
advantage of my being friendly, will he? Only thing is---- I sha'n't
dare to look at Henry B. when Milt calls me 'Claire' in that sedate
Brooklyn Heights presence. The dear lamb! Lonely afternoons----!"
CHAPTER XIV
THE BEAST OF THE CORRAL
They met in the frost-shimmering mountain morning, on their way to the
corral, to get their cars ready before breakfast. They were shy, hence
they were boisterous, and tremendously unreferential to campfire
confidences, and informative about distilled water for batteries, and
the price of gas in the Park. On Milt's shoulder rode Vere de Vere who,
in her original way, relieved one pause by observing "Mrwr."
They came in through the corral gate before any of the other motor
tourists had appeared--and they stupidly halted to watch a bear, a
large, black, adipose and extremely unchained bear, stalk along the line
of cars, sniff, cock an ear at the Gomez, lumber up on its
running-board, and bundle into the seat. His stern filled the space
between side and top, and he was to be heard snuffing.
"Oh! Look! Milt! Left box of candy on seat---- Oh, please drive him
away!"
"Me? Drive--that?"
"Frighten him away. Aren't animals afraid human eye----"
"Not in this park. Guns forbidden. Animals protected by U. S. Army,
President, Congress, Supreme Court, Department of Interior, Monroe
Doctrine, W. C. T. U. But I'll try--cautiously."
"Don't you want me think you're hero?"
"Ye-es, providin' I don't have to go and be one."
They edged toward the car. The bear flapped his hind legs, looked out at
the intruders, said "Oofflll!" and returned to the candy.
"Shoo!" Milt answered politely.
"Llooffll!"
From his own bug, beside the Gomez, Milt got a tool kit, and with
considerable brilliance as a pitcher he sent a series of wrenches at the
agitated stern of the bear. They offended the dignity of the ward of the
Government. He finished the cover and ribbons of the candy box, and
started for Milt ... who proceeded with haste toward Claire ... who was
already at the gate.
Lady Vere de Vere, cat of a thousand battles, gave one frightful squawl,
shot from Milt's shoulder and at the bear, claws out, fur electric. The
bear carelessly batted once with its paw, and the cat sailed into the
air. The satisfied bear strolled to the fence, shinned up it and over.
"Good old Vere! That wallop must of darn near stunned her, though!" Milt
laughed to Claire, as they trotted back into the corral. The cat did not
move, as they came up; did not give the gallant "Mrwr" with which she
had saluted Milt on lonely morning after morning of forlorn driving
behind the Gomez. He picked Vere up.
"She's--she's dead," he said. He was crying.
"Oh, Milt---- Last night you said Vere was all the family you had. You
have the Boltwoods, now!"
She did not touch his hand, nor did they speak as they walked soberly to
the far side of the corral, and buried Lady Vere de Vere. At breakfast
they talked of the coming day's run, from the canyon out of the Park,
and northward. But they had the queer, quick casualness of intimates.
* * * * *
It was at breakfast that her father heard one Milt Daggett address the
daughter of the Boltwoods as "Claire." The father was surprised into
clearing his throat, and attacking his oatmeal with a zealousness
unnatural in a man who regarded breakfast-foods as moral rather than
interesting.
While he was lighting a cigar, and Claire was paying the bill, Mr.
Boltwood stalked Milt, cleared his throat all over again, and said,
"Nice morning."
It was the first time the two men had talked unchaperoned by Claire.
"Yes. We ought to have a good run, sir." The "sir" came hard. The
historian puts forth a theory that Milt had got it out of fiction. "We
might go up over Mount Washburn. Take us up to ten thousand feet."
"Uh, you said--didn't Miss Boltwood tell me that you are going to
Seattle, too?"
"Yes."
"Friends there, no doubt?"
Milt grinned irresistibly. "Not a friend. But I'm going to make 'em. I'm
going to take up engineering, and some French, I guess, at the
university there."
"Ah. Really?"
"Yes. Been too limited in my ambition. Don't see why I shouldn't get out
and build railroads and power plants and roads--Siberia, Africa, all
sorts of interesting places."
"Quite right. Quite right. Uh, ah, I, oh, I---- Have you seen Miss
Boltwood?"
"I saw Miss Boltwood in the office."
"Oh yes. Quite so. Uh--ah, here she is."
When the Gomez had started, Mr. Boltwood skirmished, "This young man----
Do you think you better let him call you by your Christian name?"
"Why not? I call him 'Milt.' 'Mr. Daggett' is too long a handle to use
when a man is constantly rescuing you from the perils of the deep or
hoboes or bears or something. Oh, I haven't told you. Poor old Milt, his
cat was killed----"
"Yes, yes, dolly, you may tell me about that in due time, but let's
stick to this social problem for a moment. Do you think you ought to be
too intimate with him?"
"He's only too self-respecting. He wouldn't take advantage----"
"I'm quite aware of that. I'm not speaking on your behalf, but on his.
I'm sure he's a very amiable chap, and ambitious. In fact---- Did you
know that he has saved up money to attend a university?"
"When did he tell you that? How long has he been planning---- I thought
that I----"
"Just this morning; just now."
"Oh! I'm relieved."
"I don't quite follow you, dolly, but---- Where was I? Do you realize
what a demure tyrant you are? If you can drag me from New York to the
aboriginal wilds, and I did _not_ like that oatmeal, what will you do to
this innocent? I want to protect him!"
"You better! Because I'm going to carve him, and paint him, and possibly
spoil him. The creating of a man--of one who knows how to handle
life--is so much more wonderful than creating absurd pictures or statues
or stories. I'll nag him into completing college. He'll learn
dignity--or perhaps lose his simplicity and be ruined; and then I'll
marry him off to some nice well-bred pink-face, like Jeff Saxton's
pretty cousin--who may turn him into a beastly money-grubber; and I'm
monkeying with destiny, and I ought to be slapped, and I realize it, and
I can't help it, and all my latent instinct as a feminine meddler is
aroused, and--golly, I almost went off that curve!"
CHAPTER XV
THE BLACK DAY OF THE VOYAGE
That was the one black day of her voyage--black stippled with crimson.
It began with the bear's invasion of the car, resulting in long
claw-marks across the upholstery, the loss of some particularly good
candy bought at a Park hotel, and genuine grief abiding after the
sentimental tragedy of Vere de Vere's death. The next act was the
ingenious loss of all power of her engine. She forgot that, before
breakfast, Milt had filled the oil-well for her. When she stopped for
gasoline, and the seller inquired, "Quart of oil?"--she absently nodded.
So the cylinders filled with surplus oil, the spark-plugs were fouled,
and the engine had the power of a sewing machine.
She could not make Mount Washburn--she could not make even the slopes of
the lower road. Now she knew the agony of the feeble car in the
mountains--most shameful and anxious of a driver's dolors: the brisk
start up the hill, the belief that you will keep on going this time; the
feeling of weariness through all the car; the mad shifting of gears, the
slipping of the clutch, and more gas, and less gas, and wondering
whether more gas or less is the better, and the appalling knocking when
you finally give her a lot too much gas; the remembrance, when it's too
late, to retard the spark; the safe crawling up to the last sharp pitch,
just fifteen feet from the summit; the car's halting; the yelp at your
passenger, "Jump out and push!"; the painful next five feet; and the
final death of the power just as the front wheels creep up over the
pitch. Then the anxious putting on of brakes--holding the car with both
foot-brake and emergency, lest it run down backward, slip off the road.
The calf of your leg begins to ache from the pressure on the foot-brake,
and with an unsuccessful effort to be courteous you bellow at the
passenger, who has been standing beside the car looking deprecatory,
"Will you please block the back wheels with a stone--hustle up, will
you!"
All this routine Claire thoroughly learned. Always Milt bumbled up, said
cheerful things, and either hauled the Gomez over the pitch by a towline
to his bug, or getting out, pushing on a rear fender till his neck was
red and bulgy, gave the extra impetus necessary to get the Gomez over.
"Would you mind shoving on that side, just a little bit?" he suggested
to Mr. Boltwood, who ceased the elaborate smoking of cigars, dusted his
hands, and gravely obeyed, while Claire was awaiting the new captain's
command to throw on the power.
"I wish we weren't under so much obligation to this young man," said Mr.
Boltwood, after one crisis.
"I know but--what can we do?"
"Don't you suppose we might pay him?"
"Henry B. Boltwood, if you tried to do that---- I'm not sure. Your being
my parent might save you, but even so, I think he'd probably chase you
off the road, clear down into that chasm."
"I suppose so. Shall we have to entertain him in Seattle?"
"Have to? My dear parent, you can't keep me from it! Any of the Seattle
friends of Gene Gilson who don't appreciate that straight, fine,
aspiring boy may go---- Not overdo it, you understand. But---- Oh, take
him to the theater. By the way; shall we try to climb Mount Rainier
before----"
"See here, my good dolly; you stop steering me away from my feeble
parental efforts. Do you wish to be under obligations----"
"Don't mind, with Milt. He wouldn't charge interest, as Jeff Saxton
would. Milt is, oh, he's folks!"
"Quite true. But are we? Are you?"
"Learning to be!"
Between discussions and not making hills, Claire cleaned the spark plugs
as they accumulated carbon from the surplus oil--or she pretended to
help Milt clean them. The plugs were always very hot, and when you were
unscrewing the jacket from the core, you always burned your hand, and
wished you could swear ... and sometimes you could.
After noon, when they had left the Park and entered Gardiner, Milt
announced, "I've got to stick around a while. The key in my
steering-gear seems to be worn. May have to put in a new one. Get the
stuff at a garage here. If you wouldn't mind waiting, be awful glad to
tag, and try to give a few helping hands till the oil cleans itself
out."
"I'll just stroll on," she said, but she drove away as swiftly as she
could. Her father's worry about obligations disturbed her, and she did
not wish to seem too troublesome an amateur to Milt. She would see him
in Livingston, and tell him how well she had driven. The spark plugs
kept clean enough now so that she could command more power, but----
Between the Park and the transcontinental road there are many climbs
short but severely steep; up-shoots like the humps on a scenic railway.
To tackle them with her uncertain motor was like charging a machine-gun
nest. She spent her nerve-force lavishly, and after every wild rush to
make a climb, she had to rest, to rub the suddenly aching back of her
neck. Because she was so tired, she did not take the trouble to save her
brakes by going down in gear. She let the brakes smoke while the river
and railroad below rose up at her.
There was a long drop. How long it was she did not guess, because it was
concealed by a curve at the top. She seemed to plane down forever. The
brakes squealed behind. She tried to shift to first but there was a
jarring snarl, and she could neither get into first nor back into third.
She was running in neutral, the great car coasting, while she tried to
slow it by jamming down the foot-brake. The car halted--and started on
again. The brake-lining which had been wished on her at Saddle Back was
burnt out.
She had the feeling of the car bursting out from under control ... ready
to leap off the road, into a wash. She wanted to jump. It took all her
courage to stay in the seat. She got what pressure she could from the
remaining band. With one hand she kept the accelerating car in the
middle of the road; with the other she tried to pull the handle of the
emergency brake back farther. She couldn't. She was not strong enough.
Faster, faster, rushing at the next curve so that she could scarce steer
round it----
As quietly as she could, she demanded of her father, "Pull back on this
brake lever, far as you can. Take both hands."
"I don't understand----"
"Heavens! Y' don't haft un'stand! Yank back! Yank, I tell you!"
Again the car slowed. She was able to get into second speed. Even that
check did not keep the car from darting down at thirty miles an
hour--which pace, to one who desires to saunter down at a dignified rate
of eighteen, is equivalent in terms of mileage on level ground to
seventy an hour, with a drunken driver, on a foggy evening, amid
traffic.
She got the car down and, in the midst of a valley of emptiness and
quiet, she dropped her head on her father's knee and howled.
"I just can't face going down another hill! I just can't face it!" she
sobbed.
"No, dolly. Mustn't. We better---- You're quite right. This young
Daggett is a very gentlemanly fellow. I didn't think his
table-manners---- But we'll sit here and regard the flora and fauna till
he comes. He'll see us through."
"Yes! He will! Honestly, dad----" She said it with the first touch of
hero-worship since she had seen an aviator loop loops. "Isn't he, oh,
effective! Aren't you glad he's here to help us, instead of somebody
like Jeff Saxton?"
"We-ul, you must remember that Geoffrey wouldn't have permitted the
brake to burn out. He'd have foreseen it, and have had a branch office,
with special leased wire, located back on that hill, ready to do
business the instant the market broke. Enthusiasm is a nice quality,
dolly, but don't misplace it. This lad, however trustworthy he may be,
would scarcely even be allowed to work for a man like Geoffrey Saxton.
It may be that later, with college----"
"No. He'd work for Jeff two hours. Then Jeff would give him that 'You
poor fish!' look, and Milt would hit him, and stroll out, and go to the
North Pole or some place, and discover an oil-well, and hire Jeff as his
nice, efficient general manager. And---- I do wish Milt would hurry,
though!"
It was dusk before they heard the pit-pit-pit chuckling down the hill.
Milt's casual grin changed to bashfulness as Claire ran into the road,
her arms wide in a lovely gesture of supplication, and cried, "We been
waiting for you so long! One of my brake-bands is burnt out, and the
other is punk."
"Well, well. Let's try to figure out something to do."
She waited reverently while the local prophet sat in his bug, stared at
the wheels of the Gomez, and thought. The level-floored,
sagebrush-sprinkled hollow had filled with mauve twilight and creeping
stilly sounds. The knowable world of yellow lights and security was far
away. Milt was her only means of ever getting back to it.
"Tell you what we might try," he speculated. "I'll hitch on behind you,
and hold back in going down hill."
She did not even try to help him while he again cleaned the spark plugs
and looked over brakes, oil, gas, water. She sat on the running-board,
and it was pleasant to be relieved of responsibility. He said nothing at
all. While he worked he whistled that recent refined ballad:
I wanta go back to Oregon
And sit on the lawn, and look at the dawn.
Oh motheruh dear, don't leavuh me here,
The leaves are so sere, in the fallothe year,
I wanta go back to Oregugon,
To dearuh old Oregugon.
They started, shouting optimistically to each other, lights on, trouble
seeming over--and they stopped after the next descent, and pools of
tears were in the corners of Claire's eyes. The holdback had not
succeeded. Her big car, with its quick-increasing momentum, had jerked
at the bug as though it were a lard-can. The tow-rope had stretched,
sung, snapped, and again, in fire-shot delirium, she had gone rocking
down hill.
He drove up beside her, got out, stood at her elbow. His "I'm a bum
inventor. We'll try somethin' else" was so careless that, in her
nerve-twanging exhaustion she wailed, "Oh, don't be so beastly cheerful!
You don't care a bit!"
In the dusk she could see him straighten, and his voice came sharp as he
ignored the ever-present parental background and retorted, "Somebody has
got to be cheerful. Matter fact, I worked out the right stunt, coming
down."
Like a man in the dentist's chair, recovering between bouts, she drowsed
and ignored the fact that in a few minutes she would again have to
reassemble herself, become wakeful and calm, and go through quite
impossible maneuvers of driving. Milt was, with a hatchet from his
camping-kit, cutting down a lar
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