 8 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 a cowl. He made Lady Verdever 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, will settle down some day and be solid citizens and raised families and wheeze when we walk, but all those hills to sail over, and come on, let's sail. Milt attended the emotion 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 low brow-ism, 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 great 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 newspaper men, 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 daylight. 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 head-ecky waiting rooms of stations, they must like those 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 and 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 Shoe and Strom. They scooped up what little business there was and escaped from the Leipzig house to spend the night at St. Cloud or Salk Center. 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 Gomez depth 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 KC. 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 Max's old home lunch at Shonestrom, 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 land 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, peak collars secured by gold safety pins. And to the belted fawn overcoat that the St. Clappstock banker 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 ver de ver, 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 were Stabargen and two pairs for two bits. But even as Adolf Zolzak and an agent for fliver accessories are ye become in my eyes, ye generation of vipers, ye clumsy bag-footed wrinkle-sighted gunny-sacking ye. Next day in the woods a happy hobo found the manna bringing ravens had left him four pairs of good socks. Five quite expensive pairs of silk and lyle socks Milt purchased, all that the general merchant and Jep 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 much 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 Clare Bult would have. Gustily intoning to ver-de-ver, who was the perfect audience in as much as she never had anything to say but, meo, 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, very. Hesperids? No. Hesperides, yebo, now that man in the hotel. May I trouble you for the train-guide? Thanks so much. But how much is so much? As Clare's days were set free by her consciousness of sun and brown earth, so Milt's odyssey was only the more valorous in his endeavour to criticise life. He saw that Max's lunch-room had not been an altogether satisfactory home, that Max'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 there was an interesting thing he remembered hearing his teacher call, Good Taste. He was not the preoccupied Milt of the garage, but a gay-eyed galant the evening when he gave a lift to the schoolteacher 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 schoolteacher of nineteen or twenty. You 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 worthwhile 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 schoolteacher. Didn't mean to. Excuse, 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 show and strong 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. Mild 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, I 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? Not exactly, but, say, did you study rhetoric in normal school? I have a rhetoric that's got all kind of poetic extract, you know, and quotations and everything from the big writers. Stevenson and all. Always been so practically making a garage pay, never thought much about how I said things as long as I could say no and say it quick, except maybe when I was talking to the prof there. But it's a great sport to see how musical you can make a thing sound. Words. Like Shenandoah. Dolly, isn't that a wonderful word? Makes you see old white mansion and mockingbirds. Wonderfifella could be a big engineer, you know, build bridges and so on, and still talk about, oh, beautiful things. What do you think, girly? 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 karam over the roads around Shulonstrom, 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 to breathlessly, he halted, teased there to there, climbed out, and sitting on a hilltop, his hands about his knees, drenched his soul with the vision of amber distances. He tried to time his progress so that he might always be from three to five miles behind Claire. Distance enough to be unnoticed, yet 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 fliver, 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 buddy 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 rum-hound. 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 there to there, rubbed her fur against his cheek while he borne. 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 and showing strong. For keeps, I guess. I don't know I had feelings that could get hurt like this. Thought I had 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. The way I saw her through the window at the hotel in that blue silk-address. 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 a ver-de-ver. 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 an ice strip? 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 hanging behind her. No, sir, never 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 staring into an abandoned farm-yard, parking the car behind Cottonwoods and neglected tall current bushes which would conceal it from the road. The windows of the deserted house stared at him. A flintered screen door banged in every breeze. Likens leered from the cracks of the porch. The yard was filled with a litter of Cottonwood twigs, and over the flower garden hulked raggedy weeds. In the ranked 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 dust 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 an odd hole. He told himself that he was absolutely sure about it, and every time it came he stroked very, very carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the screen door, he said, Jiminy! The 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 hardened 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 door-yard among dry, blazing planes 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 current bushes and thought of a 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 cask-low in the London fog, of youth not rough-housing and wanting to be a sport, yet in frail beauty and faded crimson banners finding such exultation had shown strong had never known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away. In Vachal 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 milk 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 sun rise burns. I see great flashes where the far trail turns. Butting through the delicate mist 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, hoe for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn, hoe for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn. Milk 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. Milk saw himself a crossed 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. Oh, boys, Europe. And rhymed. Belly aching about hard luck. But these books, they're me. Very carefully. No, they're I. And she gave him 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 Clare 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, Milk from afar saw her patch-a-tube bump 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, peeked 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 starled, No, I ain't seen nobody named Smith. Anything 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. Milk 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-feet that was slew here last summer. When Clare 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 burrowing motor he groaned, now I probably never will see her again, except that she thinks I'm such a pest that if I doesn'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. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Free Air This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 9 The Man with Agate Eyes When her car had crossed the Missouri River on the swing ferry between Bismarck and Mandan, Clare 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 Clare's heart leaped. Beyond was her first butte, its sharp cut sides glittering yellow, and she fancied that on it the sue 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 breath. Sometimes on a cloudy day the wash of wheat lands 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, unsoffened, she found a frank cleanness, as though the inhabitants looked squarely out at life unafraid. She felt 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, wow by heck. For she had spent an hour talking to one Dakota farmer, genie-alied, 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, Clare 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 badlands, and the road twisted in the shadow of a flying buttress 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. Clare had often given lifts to tramping harvesters and even hobos along the road, had enjoyed the sight of their duffel bags stuck up between the sleek fenders in the hood and their talk about people and crops along the road as they hung on the roaning board. In the country of long hill slopes and sentinel buttes between Dakota Badlands and Miles City, she stopped to shout to a man whose plotting heavy back looked fagged. Want to ride? Sure, you bet. Usually her guest 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 the 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? Yes, some distance. Expensive car? Why, afraid 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. Why, 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 looks seemed to add, and you know it unless you're a fool. If I didn't make Glendive tonight, at least that far. Say, lady, how's the chance for borrowing a couple of dollars? I was working for a finsky back here a ways, and he did me dirt, holding 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-bit flop for tonight. Could you loosen up and slip me just a couple of pounds? Mr. Bolt would intervene. 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. Bolt would struggle on, that a strong fellow like you should be utterly destitute when I see all these farmers able to have cars. Their guests instantly abandoned his attitude of supplication for one of boasting. Destitute? Who the hell said I was destitute, eh? 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 because I'm hoofing it. I don't want no charity from nobody. I could buy out half of these Hanyockers. 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 advanced-to-pay day. Got a check coming. You high-toned kid-glove-eastern-trowress want to watch out who you go calling destitute. I bet I make a lot more money than a lot of your four flushing 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 host at the next town. The man was storming with a very meek ending. I'm telling you I can make money anywhere. I'm a cracked 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 horde. 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. And no, sir, I have not. All right, boss, no bad feelings. 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 it's warmth on her back. She burst out, flaring. Kindly do not touch me. Jay, did I touch you, girly? 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 of my excuse me, lady, I almost fell off. Quite 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 windshield. 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. Hail! His hand slid from her wrist to the steering wheel. I can drive this boat as well as you can. You make one move to stop, and I steer her over, bluey, 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 40 feet, turning over and over. You wouldn't dare, because you'd go too, she panted. Well, dear, you just try any monkey business, and you'll find out how much I'll go, go, go, go, go to. I'll start you down the joy slope and jump off, Savvy. Take your foot off that clutch. She obeyed. Pretty little feet, ain't they cutie? Shoes cost about 12 bucks, I reckon. While a better man than you or your old moldy face there has to hit the pike in three-dollar brogands. Sit down, you 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. I'll be sensible. What would you do if the car did stop? I could blackjack you both before this well-elegant vehicle 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 apiece, I'm going to drive all the cute little boys and girls up a side trail and take all of Papa's gosh-what-a-wad in the cunning poteet book. And I guess we'll kiss little daughter on a wave in our hand politely and let you suckers walk to the next bird. You wouldn't dare. You wouldn't dare. Dare, huh? Don't make the driver laugh. I'll get help. Yep, sure. In fact, there's a car coming toward us. About a mile away I'd make it, wouldn't you? Well, doll face, if you make one peep over the bank you go, both of you dead as a coupling pin, smeared all over those rocks. Get me? And me? Incredible accident was so naughty and went and happened, and I just got off and timed myself. 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 wasting my time as a captain 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 us. In 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, trucking 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 staring. She was in a haze, conscious only of her father's hand fondling hers. She heard a quick 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. Hello, folks, having a picnic? Who's your little friend and 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. End of chapter 9. Chapter 10 of Free Air This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 10. The Curious Incident of the Hillside Road So unexpectedly, so genially, that Clare 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 getting a lift. He sped up the car with a hand-throvel. Milt accelerated equally. Clare roused, wanted a shout. She was palsy to fray 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, bow. More room in this here handsome cooplet. 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 the pleasure of your company. I like your looks. You're a blue and little island way off on the dim silver skyline. Clare knitted her brows. She had not seen Milt's rhetoric. You're an island of Hesperides or Hesperides. Accent on the Bezusis. Oh yes, Moondream, I think you'd better come. Haven't decided. Milt's tongue 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 them off the bank. No, you won't, sweetheart, because why? Because what I'll do to you afterwards. You won't do nothing, Jack, because I'd gouge your eyes out. Why, love-sold, you suppose I'd be talking up as brash as this to a big, strong man like, ooh, if I didn't have a gun handy? Yeah, I guess so, little 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 60 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, rabid-y figure, humping himself over the back track. As the bug whirled down on him, Milt 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 get 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 pinch next town. But you had a gun, a revolver. Didn't you lad? Panted Mr. Boltwood. Um, well, I've got a shotgun. It wouldn't take me more than five or ten minutes to dig it out and put it together. And there are some shells. They may be all right. Haven't looked at them 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. Oh, confided Milt. How did you know we needed you? Well, I backed there a 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. Same as 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. How 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 someplace? 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. Mr. 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 consideration, you know, remuneration. And you could, thanks. 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. Bolt would ardently beg 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. Afraid I couldn't, I'm kind of a lone wolf. Please, pretty please, be sought, 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 at 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 a once-over before you pick them up. Picking up bad men is no more dangerous here than it would be in New York. In fact, there's a lot more hold-ups in any city as wild as country. I don't think you showed such awful 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've got to chase on. Don't want to wear out the welcome on the doormat. And I'm doing Seattle and, say, Ms. Boltwood. He swung out of the bug, picked up, climbed back, and went awkwardly on. I read those books you gave me. They're slick. I mean, to say, interesting. For that young fellow in youth's encounter wanted to be a bishop and a soldier and everything, just like me, except showing strong is different from London in some ways. I always wanted to be a breaky and then a yagman, but I wasn't bright enough for either. I just became a garage man, and I someday 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 of 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 milk, no teal-bug on the road ahead. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of Free Air. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 11. Sagebrush Tourists of the Great Highway. She had rested for two days in Miles City, had seen the horse market with horse wranglers and chaps, had taken dinner with army people at Fort Keough, 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 out, there's a Connecticut car. To the Eastern-er, 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 in Yellowstone, but also she found herself companionable with families of workmen headed for a new town and a new job and driving because of fliver, bought secondhand 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 the tunnel, 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 boardway 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. Grandfather and the youngest baby gamboling together while the limousine invalids insulated from life by plate glass preserved by their steady 40 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 hadn't they come by train. If Claire Bolt would have been protected by Jeff Saxton or by a chauffeur, she too would probably have marveled at cars gray with dust, the unshaved men and 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 goes 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 and icebox, 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 there are hints of frontier days. Still trudge the prairie schooners, cow punchers and chaps still stand at the doors of log cabins when they are tired of playing the automatic piano, and blanket indians, black feet and crows stare at five-story buildings when they are not driving modern reapers on their farms. They all wave to Claire. Telephone linemen, lawling with pipes and climber strapped legs in big trucks, sang out to her. Traction engine crews shouted and knees 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 tarpaper-shack waved to her. And in that wistful gesture, Claire found friendships. 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 and gray yet pregnant earth between. Or a few exquisite green and white flashes of the herb called snow on the mountain. The inhabitants were jack rabbits 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 plotting. 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 thin high air, and when it came down, it sang hallelujahs because the sagebrush fragrance was more healing than pineywoods because the sharp bitten edges of the buttes were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise. And because a real person, one milk dagget, though she would never see him again, had found her worthy of worship, she did not often think of milk, and 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 man had sometimes aroused for the impression of manicured agreeableness and efficiency which Jeff Saxton carried about. She always supplicated the mythical milk 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 2 p.m. discovery that her eyes ached and the dawning of huge amber glasses which gave to her life smartness a counterfeit scholarly-ness. Toward night the quarter hour of level sunglare 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, there 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 plotting contempt 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 milk to share her exultation. Rather earnestly she said to Mr. Boltwood, the mountains must be so wonderful to Mr. Dagget after spending his life in a cornfield. Poor milk, 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 a real American. His imagination and adaptability. It's a shame. All the petty-fours and buck-recitals wasted on Jeff Saxton. When a milk dag, yes, yes, quite so. No, honest. The deer-honey lamb, so ingenious and, really, rather good-looking. But so lonely and gregarious, like a little wooly dog that begs you to come and play. And I slapped him when he patted his paws and gambled. 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 Gala head thoroughly be fogged 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 forward 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 dustedly tramped two miles to a ranch house and telephoned to the nearest garage in a town called Saddleback. Whenever a motorist has delirium, he mutters those lamentable words, telephone to the nearest garage. She had to wait a tedious hour before she saw a fliver rattling up with a garage man who wasn't a man at all, but a 14-year-old boy. He snorted, Rats, you didn't need to sin for me. Could have made it perfectly safe. He never had the greatest boy pianist receive 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 Saddleback, she said appealingly to the man in charge a serious, lip-puffing person of 45. Would it be great to come in with a break band like that? No, pretty risky, won't it, Mike? The Mike to whom he turned for authority was the same 14-year-old boy. He snapped, Heck, that? No. Put in a new band. Get busy. Bring me the jacket. 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 as Repair Boy, the precocious expert stripped stressingly 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 15 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 California Candy Kitchen, Saddleback Montana, across from Tubbs Garage, that she could tell whether they were selling more Atharva cigarettes or Pollutrapons. 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 line after you 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 and brake cap sat Milt Daggett, and he yelped at her with earnestness and much noise. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of Free Air. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 12. The Wonders of Nature with All Modern Improvements. Hello, said Milt. Hello, said Claire. Howdy-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 apiece. 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 9,000 feet in 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 peace. So jolly you're going through the park. Yes, thought might as well. What the guidebooks call Wonders of Nature. Only wonder of nature I ever saw in Shoe and Strom was my friend Mack 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 was a man of 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 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, paper brake bands, and this here special aviation engine, specially built for a bumblebee, is what the catalogs call a powerful brute. Clara 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 boat woods invited him to dinner at one hotel, but he refused and 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 tourist who, she alleged, preferred freak museum pieces to plain beauty, who never admired a view unless it was labeled by a signpost and megaphone 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, yes, I guess there's something to that. She was, he pondered, so darn particular. How could he ever figure out what to do? No thanks, much obliged, but yes, he'd better not accept her invitation to dinner. Darn sorry couldn't come out, but had promised a fellow down at the camp to have a child with him. If in this Milt was voracious, he was rather fickle to his newly discovered friend. 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 30 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 grapefruit on a merry-go-round. Back in Shonestrom, fortified by Mack and the bunch at the old home lunch, and though less noisily than the others would have yelled, get on to Percy's beer-bottle pants. What's he got his neck managed 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 fellas 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 that fella and Claire are talking pretty swift. He doesn't need any piston rings that lad. Wonder what they're talking about. Music got gas, 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 them. 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, and decided the toothpicks were inelegant in his tragic mood, and long 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 WAP, or something. I could get onto the sedan styles in highbrow talk as long as it was in American. I could probably sprinkle in and power 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 par-le-vous wee-wee, 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 flat Dutch, 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 pole. I never could pull that finger pole stuff, pinning your ears back and jiu-jitsu-ing the fried chicken and then doing a high dive into a little dish that ain't, that isn't either a washbowl or a real good lemonade. He's a perfect lady, Percy is, dabs his mouth with his napkin like a watchmaker tinkering the carburetor and wristwatch. Look at him bowing straight, 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 webfooted and butterfingered, and he seems to know all that bunch. Bows to every maiden and in the shop. Now if I was following her, I'd never see anybody but her. 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 to do that. 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 who looked at mountaintops filming in starlight, while the cologne-atomized mode breaches, quoted, ah, to his far heaven my odd heart seeks when I behold those mighty peaks. Milt could hear him commenting, doesn't that just get the feeling of the great open mistbolt wood? Milt could not catch her answer. Himself he'd grunted, I never could get much head up about this poetry that's full of words. Claire must have seen Milt just after he sauntered past. She cried, oh, Mr. Daggett, just a moment. She left the breaches and 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. 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 jackass. I don't believe he's ever been dressed in his life. He thinks riding breaches are the... Oh, that's it. Breaches, not pants. Last word in smartness. Overdressing is just 10 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 show him strong? Never been there. This tailor is a busy boy. He fitted out about 11,000 people last year. I see. Ready-mades. Cheer up. That's where Henry B. Boltwood gets most of his clothes. Mr. Daggett, if I ever catch you in the aren't I a beautiful frame of mind of your friend back there 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 to 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 had an idea I meant him. Then he slickered his hair at me and moved. 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. Dagget, 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 Hanson 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 cler should once have been permitted to live. And then I saw you. Through all her time raid 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 writing 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 writing breaches. But for writing, 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, 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. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of Free Air. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 13. 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 mills 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 was still miles of empty airy drop above the riverbed. Claire had a quaking feeling that this rough pulpit was going to slide. She thrust out her hand, seized Milts 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 maternly falls, up at lone pines clinging to jutting rocks that must be already crashing toward her, and in the splendor she knew the panic of fear that is the deepest reaction to beauty. Milts merely shook his head as he stared up. He had neither gossiped nor coyly squeezed her hand as he had guided her. She felt of thinking that she preferred this American boy in this American scene to a nimble gentleman saluting the alps in a dinking green hat with a little feather. It was Milts 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 had cut this jovian in tally-o. 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 Milts in the exploration of their camp with 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 Ivonez. 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 schoolteacher working here in vacation, at the long busy, scenically conversational table. Our waitress? Well, sort of. I understand she's a professor of literature in some college, said Milts 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 found it. The camp's evening bonfire was made of logs on end about a stake of iron. The fireANTs Crewed Swan盜 River and Old Black Joe and Clear Crewed with them. She had been afraid that her father would be bored, but she saw that above his carefuly tended σ唦. 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. Bolt would follow them too late. For the 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 showing strong. But just showing strong might be extremely interesting. But honest, you'd think I was edging in on you. I know what you're 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 deserved being beaten. But you do keep on punishing, rat. Punishing? Lord, I didn't mean to. No, honest. It was nothing. You were right. Looked as though I was inviting myself. But oh, please. This boat would don't ever think for a second 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, milk 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 on to his evil ways. He was the son of a 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 20 times as big as Shawnstrum. 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. Except Lady Vare de Vare, 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. We, that was an awful shot. First one I had in Rouse Skookles 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 Shawnstrum. I'm almost sure it was. For something. I seem to remember it was a good place. Do you own it? Really? Yes, 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-to-camp could say. Honestly? Well, I don't know. Who did you play with in Shawnstrum? Oh, I wish I'd noticed that town. But I couldn't tell them that. What? Which girl did you fall in love with? None. Honest. None. Not one. Never fell in love. You're unfortunate. I have lots of time. 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 someday, 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 here against mountains. Someday you'll be back in, where is it, 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, must I? I won't always be driving through this big land. But will I get all fussy and ribbon tied again when I get 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 figure out, figure out just about what kind of 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 scoop too far out of the road and pass a car or take corners too wide. You won't be fussy. But still, I suppose you'll be glad to get back among your own folks and you'll forget the wild milk that tagged along. Milk? Or Mr. Daggett? No, milk. 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 walked over me and taught me the customs of the country and never were impatient. No, I shan't forget that. Neither of the boat was well. 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, 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 show and strum. 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? 25? We're both children compared with 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? No, I hadn't thought of doing it, but all right, I will in Seattle. Believe the University of Washington is there. You mean it? Yes, I do. You're the boss. 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 zoom feel from Brooklyn is so important from her Olympian height of finishing school learning as to suggest that you do so. I don't know what a zoom feel 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 show and strong prop and his wife. The practical slaggy melt 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 show and strong as it does in certain legubrious 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, milk, please. I see it all. So it must have been wonderful. The evening when Mrs. Jones read noise, high women allowed. Tell me long before that, were you terribly lonely as a little boy? Now, milk had not been a terribly lonely little boy. He had been a leader in a gang devoted to fighting, swimming, pickerel, sparing, beggy, stealing and catching rides on freight. 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 think, Oh, gee, I wished I had somebody to play with. I always wanted to make believe Robin Hood, but none of the other kids, so many of them are German. They didn't know about Robin Hood. So I used to scout off along. If I could only have been there to be made merry for you. We'd have learned archery, lonely little boy on the doorstep. Her fingers just touched his sleeve. In her gesture, the emeraldite caught the crystal of her wristwatch. She stooped to peer at it and her pitying tenderness broke off in an agitated heavings. Is that late to bed? Good night, Milt. Good night, Miss Boatwood. 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, Willie. Only thing is, I shan't dare to look at Henry B when Milt calls me Claire and that sedate Brooklyn Heights presence. The dear lamb. Lonely afternoons. End of chapter 13 chapter 14 of free air. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 14, The Beast of the Corral. They met in the frost shimmering mountain morning on their way to the corral to get their cars ready for 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 Vair de Vair, who, in her original way, relieved one pause by observing, 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, cockaneer 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 heard to be 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 of human eye? Not in this part. Guns forbidden. Animals protected by US Army, President, Congress, Supreme Court, Department of Interior, Monroe Doctrine, WCTU. But I'll try cautiously. Don't you want me to think you're a hero? Yes, providing I don't have to go and be one. The edge toward the car. The bear flapped his hind legs, looked out at the intruders, and said, oof, and returned to the candy. Shoe, Milt answered politely. 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, very to bear, cat of a thousand battles, gave one frightful squall, shot from Milt's shoulder, and at the bear, claws out for electric. The bear carelessly battered once with its paw, and the cat sailed into the air. The satisfied bear strolled to the fence, shinnied up it and over. Good old bear, that wallop must have darn near stunder though, Milt laughed Claire as they trotted back to the corral. The cat did not move as they came up, did not give the gallop with which she had saluted Milt on lonely morning after morning of forlorn driving behind the Gomez. He picked bear up. She's, she's dead. He said he was crime. Oh, Milt. Last night you said bear 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, very to bear. At breakfast they talked of the coming days run from the canyon out of the park and northward, but they had the queer, quick casualness of intimates. It wasn't breakfast that her father heard one Milt Daggett address the daughter of the boltwoods as Claire. The father was surprised in the 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 stocked Milt cleared his throat all over again and said nice morning. It was the first time the two men had talked unshaperoned 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 Washbourne. Take us up to 10,000 feet. 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 him. 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. Ah, have you seen Miss Boltwood? I saw Miss Boltwood in the office. Oh yes, quite so. 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 hobos 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. End of chapter 14, Chapter 15 of Free Air. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 15, 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 Ver de Ver'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 that 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 door. 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 15 feet from the summit. The cars 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 a 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 milk bundled up said cheerful things and either hauled the Gomez over the pitch by a tow line 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 bade 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. You're 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 to 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 Saxon 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. Afternoon when they had left the park and entered gardener Milt announced I've got to stick around a while the key in my steering gear seems to be warm may have to put in a new one get the stuff at the 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 and 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 upshoots like the hump 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 by the river and railroad below rose up at her there was a long drop how long it was she could not guess because it was concealed by a curve at the top she seemed to plane down forever the brakes squeal 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 saddleback 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 of 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 scare steer around it as quietly as she could she demanded of her father pull back on this brake lever as far as you can take both hands i don't understand heavens you don't have to understand 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 30 miles an hour which pace to one who desires to saunter down at a dignified rate of 18 is equivalent in terms of mileage on a level ground to 70 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 muscent we better you're quite right this young daggett is a very gentlemanly fellow i don't think it's table manners but we'll sit here in 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 do loops isn't he oh effective aren't you glad he's here to help us instead of somebody like jeff saxon well you must remember that jeffrey wouldn't have permitted the break to burn out he'd have foreseen it and have had a branch office with special lease 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 jeffrey saxon 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 milk would hit him and stroll out and go to the north pole or someplace and discover an oil well and hire jeff as his nice efficient general manager and i do wish milk would hurry though it was dusk before they heard the pit pit pit chuckling down the hill milk's casual grin changed to bashfulness as claire ran into the road her arms wide and a lovely gesture of supplication and cried we've been waiting for you so long one of my break 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 floor sage brush sprinkled hollow had filled with mauve twilight and creeping stilly sounds the knowledgeable world of yellow lights and security was far away milk 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 you back and going downhill she did not even try to help him while he again cleaned the spark plugs and looked over breaks 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 want to go back to oregon and sit on the lawn and look at the dawn oh mother dear don't leave me here that leaves so sear in the fall of the year i want to go back to oregon the dear old oregon 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 large can the toe rope had stretched sung snapped and again in fire shot delirium she had gone rocking downhill he drove up beside her got out stood at her elbow his i'm a bum inventor will try something else was so careless that in her nerve twang 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 of fact i worked out the right stunt coming down like a man in the dentist 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 milk was with a hatchet from his camping kit cutting down a large scrub pine he dragged it to the gomez and hitched it to the back axle the knuckles of the branches would dig into the earth and the foliage catch at every pebble there that anchor would hold a truck he shouted it held she went down the next two hills easily but she was through her forearms and brain were equally numb she appealed to milk i can't seem to go on anymore it's so dark and i'm so tired all right no ranch houses anywhere is near so we'll camp here if mr boltwood doesn't mind claire stirred herself to help him prepare dinner it wasn't much of a dinner to prepare both cars had let provisions run low they had bacon and petrified ends of a loaf and something like coffee not much like it scientists may be interested in their discovery that has a substitute for both cream and sugar in beverages strawberry jam as a fallacy for mr boltwood's bed milk hauled out the springy seat cushions of both cars the gomez cushion was three inches thicker than that of the bug which resulted in a mattress two stories in front with a lean to it the foot and the entire edifice highly slippery but with a blanket for milk's kit it was sufficient to claire milk gave another blanket his collection of antique overcoats and good advice he spoke vaguely of a third blanket for himself and he had one its dimensions were 13 by 20 inches it was a white wool he had bought it in dakota for ver de ver and many times that day he had padded it and whispered for old cat under his blankets mr boltwood thought of rattlesnakes bears rheumatism brooklyn and his debt to milk and the fact that though he hadn't happened to mention that claire he had expected to be killed when the break burned out claire was drowsily happy she had got through she was conscious of rustling sagebrush of the rapids of the yellowstone beside her of open sky and sweet air and a scorn for people in stuffing rooms and comfortably ever conscious of milk 10 feet away she had in him the interest that a young physician would have in a new x-ray machine a printer in the new fountain type any creator in a new outlet for his power she would see to it that her seattle cousins the gilsons helped him to know the right people during his university work she herself would be back in brooklyn but perhaps he could write to her write write letters brooklyn she was in brooklyn no no where was she oh yes camping bad day breaks no she would not marry jeff sachston brooklyn river singing stars and when milk wasn't unromatically thinking of his cold back he exalted she won't be back among her own folks till seattle probably forget me then don't blame her but till we get there she'll let me play in her yard gee in the morning i'll be talking to her again and she's right there right now in the morning they were all very stiff but glad of the sun on sagebrush and river and the boy and girl sang over breakfast while milk was gathering fuel he looked up at claire standing against the background of rugged hills her skirt and shoes still smug but her jacket off her blouse turned in at the throat her hair blowing her sleeves rolled up one hand on her hip erect charged with vigor the spirit of adventure when her break had been relined at livingston they sauntered companionably on to butte and the day after butte when milk was half a mile behind the gomez a pink-haired man with a large shiny revolver stepped out from certain bushes and bowed politely and at that point milk stopped end of chapter 15