WESTWARD HOBOES

THE SILVER BRACELET, WALPI.

Frontispiece

WESTWARD HOBOES

UPS AND DOWNS
OF FRONTIER MOTORING

BY

WINIFRED HAWKRIDGE DIXON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
KATHERINE THAXTER AND ROLLIN LESTER DIXON

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921

Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published October, 1921
Reprinted twice in December, 1921

PRINTED AT
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
NEW YORK, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

WESTWARD HOBOES

CHAPTER I

“WESTWARD HO!”

TOBY’S real name is Katharine. Her grandmother was a poet, her father is a scientist, and she is an artist. She is called Toby for Uncle Jonas’ dog, who had the habit, on being kicked out of the door, of running down the steps with a cheerful bark and a wagging tail, as if he had left entirely of his own accord. There is no fact, however circumstantially incriminating, which this young doctrinaire cannot turn into the most potent justification for what she has done or wishes to do, and when she gets to the tail wagging stage, regardless of how recently the bang of the front door has echoed in our ears, she wags with the charm of the artist, the logical precision of the scientist, and the ardor of the poet. Even when she ran the car into the creek at Nambe——

At the outset we did not plan to make the journey by automobile. Our destination was uncertain. We planned to drift, to sketch and write when the spirit moved. But drifting by railroad in the West implies time-tables, crowded trains, boudoir-capped matrons, crying babies and the smell of bananas, long waits and anxiety over reservations. Traveling by auto seemed luxurious in comparison and would save railroad fares, annoyance and time. We pictured ourselves bowling smoothly along in the open air, in contrast with the stifling train; we previsioned no delays, no breakdowns, no dangers; we saw New Mexico and Arizona a motorist’s Heaven, paved with asphalt and running streams of gasoline. An optimist is always like that, and two are twenty times so. I was half-owner of a Cadillac Eight, with a rakish hood and a matronly tonneau; its front was intimidating, its rear reassuring. The owner of the other half was safely in France. At the time, which half belonged to which had not been discussed. It is now a burning question. I figure that the springs, the dust-pan, the paint, mud-guards and tires constituted her share, with a few bushings and nuts thrown in for good measure, but having acquired a mercenary disposition in France, she differs from me.

What I knew of the bowels of a car had been gained, not from systematic research, but bitter experience with mutinous parts, in ten years’ progress through two, four, six and finally eight-cylinder motors of widely varying temperaments. I had taken no course in mechanics, and had, and still have, a way of confusing the differential with the transmission. But I love to tinker! In the old two-cylinder days, when the carburetor flooded I would weigh it down with a few pebbles and a hairpin, and when the feed became too scanty, I would take the hairpin out and leave the pebbles in. I had a smattering knowledge of all the deviltry defective batteries, leaky radiators, frozen steering-wheels, cranky generators, wrongly-hung springs, stripped gears and slipping clutches can perpetrate, but those parts which commonly behaved themselves I left severely alone. Toby could not drive, but a few lessons made her an apt pupil. She paid her money to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for a license, and one sparkling evening in early February we started for Springfield. We were to cover thirteen thousand miles before we saw Boston again,—eleven thousand by motor and the rest by steamship and horseback.

As I threw in the clutch, we heard a woman’s voice calling after us. It was Toby’s mother, and what she said was, “Don’t drive at night!”

******

In New York we made the acquaintance of a map—which later was to become thumbed, torn and soiled. A delightful map it was, furnished by the A.A.A., with an index specially prepared for us of every Indian reservation, natural marvel, scenic and historical spot along the ridgepole of the Rockies, from Mexico, to Canada. Who could read the intriguing list of names,—Needles, Flagstaff, Moab, Skull Valley, Keams Canyon, Fort Apache, Tombstone, Rodeo, Kalispell, Lost Cabin, Hatchita, Rosebud, Roundup, Buckeye, Ten Sleep, Bowie and Bluff, Winnemucca,—and stop at home in Boston? We were bent on discovering whether they lived up to their names, whether Skull Valley was a scattered outpost of the desert with mysterious night-riders, stampeding steer, gold-seekers, cattle thieves and painted ladies, or had achieved virtue in a Rexall drugstore, a Harvey lunch-room, a jazz parlor, a Chamber of Commerce, an Elks’ Hall, and a three story granite postoffice donated by a grateful administration? Which glory is now Skull Valley’s we do not yet know, but depend on it, it is either one or the other. The old movie life of the frontier is not obsolete, only obsolescent, provided one knows where to look. But the day after it vanishes a thriving city has arrived at adolescence and “Frank’s” and “Bill’s” have placed a liveried black at their doors, and provided the ladies’ parlor upstairs with three kinds of rouge.

It was love at first sight—our map and us. Pima and Maricopa Indians, Zuni and Laguna pueblos, the Rainbow Bridge and Havasupai Canyon beckoned to us and hinted their mysteries; our itinerary widened until it included vaguely everything there was to see. We made only one reservation—we would not visit California. California was the West, dehorned; it possessed climate, boulevards and conveniences; but it also possessed sand fleas and native sons. It was a little thing which caused us to make this decision, but epochal. At the San Francisco Exposition, I had seen a long procession of Native Sons, dressed in their native gold—a procession thousands strong. Knowing what one native son can do when he begins on his favorite topic of conversation, we dared not trust ourselves to an army of them, an army militant.

What we planned to do was harder and less usual. We would follow the old trails, immigrant trails, cattle trails, traders’ routes,—mountain roads which a long procession of cliff dwellers, Spanish friars, gold seekers, Apache marauders, prospectors, Mormons and scouts had trod in five centuries, and left as they found them, mere footprints in the dust. The Southwest has been explored afoot and on horse, by prairie schooners, burro, and locomotive; the modern pioneer rattles his weather beaten flivver on business between Gallup and Santa Fe, Tucson and El Paso, and thinks nothing of it, but the country is still new to the motoring tourist. Because a car must have the attributes of a hurdler and a tightrope walker, be amphibious and fool-proof, have a beagle’s nose for half-obliterated tracks, thrill to the tug of sand and mud, and own a constitution strong enough to withstand all experiments of provincial garage-men, few merciful car owners will put it through the supreme agony. Had not the roads looked so smooth on the map we wouldn’t have tried them ourselves.

And then, in New York, we met another optimist, and two and one make three. It was not until long afterward, when we met the roads he described as passable, that we discovered he was an optimist. He had motored through every section of the West, and paid us the compliment of believing we could do the same. When he presented us with our elaborate and beautiful itinerary he asked no questions about our skill and courage. He told us to buy an axe and a shovel, and carry a rope. A tent he advised as well, and such babes in the woods were we, the idea had not occurred to us.

“And carry a pistol?” asked Toby, eagerly.

“Never! You will be as safe—or safer than you are in New York City.” Toby was disappointed, but I heard him with relief. By nature gun-shy, I have seen too many war-dramas not to know that a pistol never shoots the person originally aimed at. The procedure never varies. A pulls a gun, points it at B. B, unflinching, engages A in light conversation. Diverted, A absent-mindedly puts down the gun, which B picks up, shooting to kill. I realized that as B my chances were better than as A, for while I would surely fall under the spell of a western outlaw’s quaint humor and racy diction and thus hand over the weapon into his keeping, the chances were that he might be equally undermined by our Boston r’s, and the appeal to his rough Western chivalry which we intended to make. Toby held out for an ammonia pistol. We did debate this for a while, but in the excitement of buying our tent we forgot the pistol entirely.

Our Optimist directed us to a nearby sports’-goods shop, recommending us to the care of a certain “Reggi,” who, he guaranteed, would not try to sell us the entire store. Confidently we sought the place,—a paradise where elk-skin boots, fleecy mufflers, sleeping bags, leather coats, pink hunting habits and folding stoves lure the very pocketbooks out of one’s hands. We asked for Mr. Reggi, who did not look as Italian as his name. He proved a sympathetic guide, steering us to the camping department. He restrained himself from selling the most expensive outfits he had. At the price of a fascinating morning and fifty-odd dollars, we parted from him, owners of a silk tent, mosquito and snake proof, which folded into an infinitesimal canvas bag, a tin lantern, which folded flat, a tin biscuit baker which collapsed into nothing, a nest of cooking and eating utensils, which folded and fitted into one two-gallon pail, a can opener, a hunting knife, doomed to be our most cherished treasure, a flashlight, six giant safety-pins, and a folding stove. The charm of an article which collapses and becomes something else than it seems I cannot analyze nor resist. Others feel it too; I know a man who once stopped a South American revolution by stepping into the Plaza and opening and shutting his opera hat.

Only one incident marred our satisfaction with the morning’s work; we discovered, on saying farewell to Reggi, that we had been calling him by his first name!

CHAPTER II

FROM NEW YORK TO ANTOINE’S

THERE were, we found, three ways to transport an automobile from New York to Texas; to drive it ourselves, and become mired in Southern “gumbo,” to ship it by rail, and become bankrupt while waiting weeks for delivery, or, cheaper and altogether more satisfactory, to send it by freight steamer to Galveston. By this means we avoided the need of crating our lumbering vehicle; we also could calculate definitely its date of arrival, and by taking a passenger boat to New Orleans, and going thence by rail, be at the port to meet it.

Our baggage we stowed in a peculiarly shaped auto trunk containing five peculiarly shaped suitcases, trapezoids all,—not a parallelepiped among them. Made to fit an earlier car, in its day it had been the laughing stock of all the porters in Europe. Too bulky to be strapped outside, it was to become a mysterious occupant of the tonneau, exciting much speculation and comment. It was to be the means of our being taken for Salvation lassies with a parlor organ, bootleggers, Spiritualists with the omnipresent cabinet, show-girls or lady shirt-waist drummers, according to the imagination of the beholder; but it never was aught but a nuisance. Whatever we needed always reposed in the bottom-most suitcase, and rather than dig down, we did without. Next time, I shall know better. A three-piece khaki suit, composed of breeches, short skirt split front and back, and many-pocketed Norfolk coat, worn with knee-high elk boots, does for daily wear in camping, riding or driving. It sheds rain, heat and cold, does not wrinkle when slept in, and only mellows with successive accumulations of dirt. For dress occasions, a dark jersey coat and skirt, wool stockings and low oxfords is magnificence itself. A heavy and a light sweater, two flannel and a half dozen cotton or linen shirts, and sufficient plain underwear suffice for a year’s knocking about. Add to this a simple afternoon frock of non-wrinkling material, preferably black, and no event finds you unprepared.

Our trunk made us trouble from the start. The administration had given us to understand we might ship it with the car, but at the last moment this was prevented by a constitutional amendment. Accordingly, an hour before our boat left, we took the trunk to the line on which we were to travel, and shipped it as personal baggage. It was only the first of many experiences which persuaded us to adopt the frontiersman’s motto, “Pack light.”

Every true yarn of adventure should begin with a sea voyage. The wharves with their heaped cargoes tying together the four ends of the world, the hoisting of the gang-plank, the steamer flirtations, the daily soundings, the eternal schools of porpoises, the menus with their ensuing disillusionments, and above all, the funny, funny passengers, each a drollery to all the others,—all these commonplaces of voyage are invested by the mighty sea with its own importance and mystery.

On board, besides ourselves, were some very funny people, and some merely funny. A swarthy family of Spaniards next us passed through all the successive shades of yellow and green, but throughout they were gay, eating oranges and chanting pretty little Castilian folk-songs. At table sat a man wearing a black and white striped shirt, of the variety known as “boiled,” a black and white striped collar of a different pattern, and a bright blue necktie thickly studded with daisies and asterisks. He looked, otherwise, like a burglar without his jimmy, especially when we saw him by moonlight glowering prognathously through a porthole. He turned out to be only a playwright and journalist, with a specialty for handing out misinformation on a different subject each meal.

The stout lady, the flirtatious purser—why is he of all classes of men the most amorous?—the bounder, the bride and groom, the flappers of both sexes, the drummer, the motherly stewardess and the sardonic steward were all present. And why does the sight of digestive anguish bring out the maternal in the female, and only profanity in the male? Our plump English stewardess cooed over us, helpless in upper and lower berths; our steward always rocked with silent mirth, and muttered, “My God!”

Our own stout lady was particularly rare. She appeared coquettishly the first calm day off Florida, in a pink gingham dress, a large black rosary draped prominently upon her,—which did not much heighten her resemblance to a Mother Superior, owing to her wearing an embroidered Chinese kimona and a monkey coat over it, and flirting so gayly with the boys. On the Galveston train later, we heard her say helplessly, “Porter, my trunk is follering me to Galveston. How shall I stop it?” She could have stopped an express van merely by standing in front of it, but we did not suggest this remedy. The picture of a docile Saratoga lumbering doggedly at her rear was too much for words.

As to the purser, we left him severely alone. We did not feel we could flirt with him in the style to which he had been accustomed.

The last night of the voyage, when the clear bright green of the Gulf of Mexico gave place to the turbulent coffee color of the Mississippi, our stewardess knocked.

“On account of the river, miss, we don’t bathe tonight.” It was a small tragedy for us. Earlier in the voyage we could not bear to see the water sliding up and down in the tub,—so much else was sliding up and down. It was on one of those days that the stewardess informed us that there were “twenty-seven ladies sick on this deck, to say nothing of twenty-four below,” and asked us how we would like a little piece of bacon. We firmly refused the bacon, but the Gilbertian lilt of her remark inspired us to composing a ballad with the refrain, “Twenty-seven sea-sick ladies we.”

The river which deprived us of our baths presented at five next morning a bleak and sluggish appearance. I missed Simon Legree and the niggers singing plantation melodies, but it may have been too early in the day. Most picturesque, busy, low-lying river it was, nevertheless, banked with shipyards, newly built wharves, coaling stations, elevators, steamship docks—evidences to a provincial Northerner that the South, wakened perhaps by the Great War, has waited for none, but has forged ahead bent on her own development, achieving her independence—this time an economic independence. To the insular Manhattanite, who thinks of New York as the Eastern gate of this country, and San Francisco as the Western, the self-sufficiency, the bustle and the cosmopolitanism of the Mississippi’s delta land, even seen through a six A.M. drizzle, gives a surprising jolt.

Six months later we were to cross the Mississippi near the headwaters not many miles from Canada. More lovely, there at the North, its broad, clear placid waters shadowed by green forests and high bluffs, it invites for a voyage of discovery.

On both banks of the river, whose forgotten raft and steamboat life Mark Twain made famous, are now being built concrete boulevards, designed to bisect the country from Canada to the Gulf. Huck Finns of the near future will be able to explore this great artery through what is now perhaps the least known and least accessible region of the country.

New Orleans, those who knew it twenty or forty years ago will tell you, has become modern and ugly, has lost its atmosphere. Drive through the newer and more pretentious outskirts, and you will believe all you are told. You will see the usual Southwestern broad boulevard, pointed with staccato palmettos, but otherwise arid of verdure, bordered with large, hideous mansions which completely overpower an occasional gem of low-verandahed loveliness, relic of happier days. For such grandeur the driver of our jitney,—undoubtedly the one used by Gen. Jackson during his defence of the city,—had an infallible instinct. I don’t think he missed one atrocity during the whole morning’s drive. Yet we passed one quite charming “colored” dwelling,—a low rambling cottage covered with vines, proudly made of glittering, silvery tin!

But in the old French or Creole quarters you find all the storied charm of the city intact,—a bit of Italy, of Old Spain, of the milder and sunnier parts of France, jumbled together with the romance of the West Indies. In the cobbled narrow pavements, down which mule teams still clatter more often than motors, the mellow old houses, with iron balconies beautifully wrought, broad verandahs, pink, green or orange plastered walls, peeling to show the red brick underneath,—shady courtyards, high-walled with fountains and stone Cupids, glimpsed through low arched doorways, markets like those of Cannes and Avignon, piled with luscious fruits, crawfish, crates of live hens, strings of onions, and barrels of huge oysters,—oh, the oysters of New Orleans,—here lies the fascination of the town.

Set down close to the wharves is this jumble of old streets, so close that the funnels of docked tramps mingle with the shop chimneys. From the wharves drift smells of the sea and sea-commerce, to join the smells of the old town. It is a subtle blend of peanuts, coffee, cooked food, garlic, poultry,—a raw, pungent, bracing odor, inclining one to thoughts of eating. And just around the corner is Antoine’s.

Eating? There should be a word coined to distinguish ordinary eating from eating at Antoine’s. The building is modest and the lettering plain, as befits the dignity of the place. The interior, plainly finished and lined with mirrors, resembles any one of five hundred un-noteworthy restaurants where business New York eats to get filled. There the resemblance stops. A sparkle, restrained and sober withal, rests on the mirrors, the glasses and the silver. The floors and woodwork have a well scrubbed look. The linen is carefully looked after, the china business-like; everything decent, adequate, spotless,—nothing to catch the eye. It is not visual aestheticism which lures us here, or causes the millionaire Manhattanite to order his private car to take him to Antoine’s for one hour of bliss. Antoine is an interior decorator of subtler but more potent distinction. And I would go even farther than that New York multi-millionaire whose name spells Aladdin to Americans; for such a meal as Antoine served us that morning, I would travel the same distance in one of those wife-killing contrivances which are the bane of every self-respecting motorist.

The waiters at Antoine’s are not hit-or-miss riff-raff sent up by a waiters’ employment bureau. They are grandfatherly courtiers who make you feel that the responsibility for your digestion lies in their hands, and for the good name of the house in yours. Old New Orleans knows them by name, and recognizes the special dignity of their priesthood, with the air of saluting equals. Their lifework is your pleasure,—the procuring of your inner contentment. You could trust your family’s honor to them, or the ordering of your meal. Only at Antoine’s and in the pages of Leonard Merrick does one find such servitors.

We accepted our Joseph’s suggestion that we allow him to bring us some of the specialties of the house. It was a wise decision,—from the prelude of oysters Rockefeller,—seared in a hot oven with a sauce of chives, butter and crumbs,—to the benediction of café brulôt. Between came a marvel of a fish, covered with Creole sauce, a sublimated chicken a la King, a salad and a sweet, all nicely proportioned to each other, but their memory was crowned by the café brulôt. In came Joseph, like all three Kings of Egypt, bearing a tall silver dish on a silver platter. The platter contained blazing brandy, the dish orange peel, lemon peel, cloves, cinnamon stick, four lumps of sugar, and two spoonfuls of brandy. Joseph stirred them into a melted nectar, then with a long silver ladle and the manner of a vestal virgin, swept the blazing brandy into the mixture above, and stood like a benevolent demon over the flame. An underling brought a pot of black coffee, which was added little by little to the fiery mixture, and stirred. Finally it was ladled into two small glasses. We swam in Swinburnian bliss. We paid our bill, and departed to a new New Orleans, where the secondhand stores were filled with genuine, priceless antiques, the pavings easy on our weary feet, the skies, as the meteorologist in the popular song observed, raining violets and daffodils. Mr. Volstead never tasted café brulôt.

CHAPTER III

A LONG WAYS FROM HOME

TWO days of downpour greeted us at Galveston while we waited for our car to arrive. It was the climax of three months of rain which had followed three drouthy years. The storm swept waves and spray over the breakwater toward the frame town which has sprung up hopefully after twice being devoured by the sea monster. A city of khaki tents dripped mournfully under the drenching; wet sentries paced the coast-line, and looked suspiciously at two ladies—all women are ladies in Texas—who cared to fight their way along the sea-wall against such a gale. Toby and I were bored, when we were not eating Galveston’s oysters.

The city, pleasant enough under the sun, had its usual allotment of boulevards, bronze monuments, drug stores, bungalows of the modest and mansions of the local plutocrats, but it had not the atmosphere of New Orleans. We were soon to learn that regardless of size, beauty or history, some towns have personality, others have about as much personality as a reception room in a Methodist dormitory.

Next day, news came that our boat had docked, and telephoning revealed that the car was safely landed. There are joys to telephoning in the South. Central is courteous and eager to please, and the voices of strangers with whom one does curt business at home become here so soft and winning that old friendships are immediately cemented, repartee indulged in, and the receiver hung up with a feeling of regret. That is the kind of voice the agent for the Mallory Line had. To be sure, it took us a day to get the car from the dock to the street, when it would have taken half an hour at home, but it was a day devoted to the finer shades of intercourse and good fellowship. I reached the dock half an hour before lunch time.

“Yes’m, the office is open, but I reckon yo’ won’t find any hands to move yo’ car,” was the accurate prediction of the official to whom I applied. “Pretty nearly lunch time, yo’ know.”

So I waited, filling in time by answering the guarded questions the watchman put to me. I was almost as fascinating an object of attention to him as his Bull Durham, though I must admit that when there was a conflict between us, I never won, except once, when he asked where the car and I came from.

“Massachusetts?” Bull Durham lost.

A great idea struggled for expression. I could see him searching for the right, the inevitable word. I could see it born, as triumph and amusement played over his features. Then caution—should he spring it all at once or save it for a climax? Nonchalantly, as if such epigrams were likely to occur to him any time, he got it off.

“You’re a long ways from home, ain’t yo’?”

With the air of saying something equally witty, I replied, “I surely am.”

Like “When did you stop beating your wife,” his question was one of those which has all the repartee its own way. For six months, we were to hear it several times daily, but it always came as a shock, and as if hypnotized, we were never to alter our response. And it was so true! We were a long ways from home, further than we then realized. At times we seemed so long that we wondered if we should ever see home again. But we were never too far to meet some man, wittier than his fellows, who defined our location accurately.

After his diagnosis and my acceptance of it, further conversation became anticlimactic. The “hands” were still absent at lunch, so I followed their example, and returning at two, found them still at lunch. But at last the agent drifted in, and three or four interested and willing colored boys. Everybody was pleasant, nobody was hurried, we exchanged courtesies, and signed papers, and after we really got down to business, in a surprisingly few minutes the car was rolled across the street by five-man power, while I lolled behind the steering wheel like Cleopatra in her galley. At the doorway the agent halted me.

“Massachusetts car?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said I. Were there to be complications?

In a flash he countered.

“Yo’ surely are a long ways from home.”

I laughed heartily, and with rapier speed replied,

“I surely am.”

******

They told us the road from Galveston to Houston (Hewston) was good—none better.

“Good shell road all the way. You’ll make time on that road.” This is the distinction between a Southerner and a Westerner. When the former tells you a road is good, he means that it once was good. When a Westerner tells you the same thing, he means that it is going to be good at some happy future date. In Texas the West and South meet.

We crossed the three-mile causeway which Galveston built at an expense of two million dollars, to connect her island town with her mainland. On all sides of us flatness like the flatness of the sea stretched to the horizon, and but for the horizon would have continued still further. The air was balmy as springtime in Italy. Meadow larks perched fat and puffy on fenceposts, dripping abrupt melodies which began and ended nowhere. The sky, washed with weeks of rain, had been dipped in blueing and hung over the earth to dry. After enduring gray northern skies, we were intoxicated with happiness.

The happier I am, the faster I drive. The road of hard oyster shell we knew was good. They had told us we could make time on it, in so many words. Forty-eight miles an hour is not technically fast, but seems fast when you suddenly descend into a hard-edged hole a foot and a half deep.

When we had separated ourselves from our baggage, we examined the springs. By a miracle they were intact. In first gear, the car took a standing jump, and emerged from the hole. For one of her staid matronly build, she did very well at her first attempt. Later she learned to leap boulders, and skip lightly from precipice to precipice and if we could have kept her in training six months longer, she could have walked out halfway on a tight-rope, turned around and got back safely to land.

The holes increased rapidly until there was no spot in the road free from them. Our course resembled an earthworm’s. Except for the holes, the road was all its sympathizers claimed for it. We maneuvered two partly washed away bridges, and came to a halt.

Airplanes were soaring above us in every direction. We were passing Ellington Field. But the immediate cause of our halt was two soldiers, who begged a lift to Houston. We were glad to oblige them, but after a hopeless glance at the tonneau piled high with baggage, they decided to ride on the running board. If the doughboy on the left had only been the doughboy on the right running board, this chapter would have been two days shorter. It was Friday, and we had thirteen miles to go, and Friday and thirteen make a bad combination.

Toby chatted with her soldier and I with mine, who was a mechanician at the flying field. It was a disappointment not to have him an aviator, though he admitted a mechanician’s was a far weightier responsibility. Before the war, he had been a professional racer, had come in second in a championship race between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and gave such good reasons why he hadn’t come in first that he seemed to have taken a mean advantage of the champion.

“Sixty-three miles is about as fast as I’ve ever driven,” I said in an off-hand way.

“Sixty-three? That’s not fast. When you get going ninety-five to a hundred, that’s something like driving.”

“This car,” I explained, “won’t make more than fifty. At fifty she vibrates till she rocks from side to side.”

He looked at the wheel hungrily. “Huh! I bet I could bring her up to seventy-five.”

Stung, I put my foot on the gas, and the speedometer needle swung to the right. As we merged with the traffic of Houston, shell-holes were left behind us, and passing cars were taking advantage of a perfect concrete road. A Hudson with a Texas number passed us with a too insistent horn, the driver smiled scornfully and looked back, and his three children leaned out from the back to grin. And they were only going a miserable thirty. The near-champion looked impotently at the steering wheel, and in agonized tones commanded, “Step on it!”

The Hudson showed signs of fight, and lured us through the traffic at a lively pace. My companion on the running board was dying of mortification. I knew how he itched to seize the wheel, and for his sake I redoubled my efforts. In a moment the impudent Hudson children ceased to leer from the back of their car, and were pretending to admire the scenery on the other side. Then suddenly the Hudson lost all interest in the race.

“Turn down the side street,” yelled my passenger, frantically. I tried to turn, wondering, but the carburetor sputtered and died.

I will say that it is almost a pleasure to be arrested in Texas. Two merry motor-cops smiled at us winsomely. There was sympathy, understanding and good fellowship in their manner,—no malice, yet firmness withal, which is the way I prefer to be handled by the police. As officers they had to do their duty. As gentlemen, they regretted it.

Toby, chatting about aviation with the man on her running-board, was completely taken by surprise to hear “Ah’m sahry, lady, but we’ll jest have to ask you-all to come along with us.”

What an embarrassing position for our passengers! They had accepted our hospitality, egged us on to unlawful speed, and landed us in the court-house,—with pay-day weeks behind. Their chagrin deepened as their efforts to free us unlawfully went for naught. Our indulgent captors could not have regretted it more if we had been their own sisters, but they made it clear we must follow them.

“You go ahead, and I’ll show her the way,” suggested my tempter. That he had traveled the same road many, many times became evident to us. In fact, he confided that he had been arrested in every state in the Union, and his face was so well known in the Houston court that the judge had wearied of fining him, and now merely let him off with a rebuke. So hoping our faces would have the same effect on the judge, we trustingly following his directions into town, our khaki-clad friends leading.

“Turn off to the right here,” said my guide. I turned, and in a flash, the motor-cycles wheeled back to us.

Smiling as ever, our captors shook their heads warningly.

“Now, lady, none of that! You follow right after us.”

Profusely my guide protested he had merely meditated a short cut to the station house. Elaborately he explained the route he had intended to take. Poor chap, D’Artagnan himself could not have schemed more nimbly to rescue a lady from the Bastille. I saw how his madcap mind had visioned the quiet turn down the side street, the doubling on our tracks, the lightning change of himself into the driver’s seat, a gray Cadillac streaking ninety miles an hour past the scattering populace of Houston, then breathless miles on into the safety of the plains—the ladies rescued, himself a hero——

Instead, we tamely drew up before a little brick station-house two blocks beyond. He did all he could, even offering to appear in court the next day and plead for us, but from what we now knew of his local record, it seemed wiser to meet the judge on our own merits.

Our arrival caused a sensation. The police circles of Houston evidently did not every day see a Massachusetts car piled high with baggage driven by two women, flanked by a soldier on each running board. When we entered the sheriff’s office, every man in the room turned his back for a moment and shook with mirth. They led me to a wicket window with Toby staunchly behind. The sheriff, in shirt sleeves and suspenders, amiably pushed a bag of Bull Durham toward me. I started back at this unusual method of exchanging formalities. A policeman, also in shirt sleeves and suspenders, a twinkle concealed in his sweet Southern drawl, explained,

“The lady thawt yo’ meant them fixin’s for her, Charley, instead of fo’ that mean speed-catcher.”

The sheriff took my name and address.

“Massachusetts?” he exclaimed. Then, all of a sudden, he shot back at me. “Yo’re a lawng ways from home!”

“I wish I were longer,” I said.

“Never mind, lady,” he said, soothingly and caressingly. “Yo’ give me twenty dollars now, and tell the jedge your story tomorrow, an’ seein’ as how you’re a stranger and a lady, he’ll give it all back to you.”

On that understanding, I paid him twenty dollars.

At three next afternoon, Toby and I sought the court-house to get our twenty dollars back, as agreed. The ante-room was filled with smoke from a group of Houstonians whose lurking smiles seemed to promise indulgence. The judge was old and impassive, filmed with an absent-mindedness hard to penetrate. Yet he, too, had a lurking grin which he bit off when he spoke.

“Yo’ are charged with exceeding the speed limit at a rate of fo’ty-five miles an hour.”

“Your Honor, this was my first day in the State, and I hadn’t learned your traffic laws.”

He looked up over his spectacles. “Yo’re from Massachusetts?”

“Yes, sir!”

Toby and I waited in suspense. We saw a faint spark light the cold, filmed blue eye, spread to the corner of his grim mouth, while a look of benevolent anticipation rippled over his set countenance. It was coming! I got ready to say with a spontaneous laugh “We surely are.”

And then he bit it off!

“Yo’ know speeding is a very serious offense——”

“I wouldn’t have done it for worlds, your Honor, if I hadn’t seen all the Texas cars going quite fast, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I did the same. I only arrived yesterday from Massachusetts.”

“Thet’s so. Yo’re from Massachusetts?”

We waited hopefully. But again he bit it off.

“It’s a mighty serious offense. But, seein’ as yo’re a stranger and a lady at that——”

His voice became indulgently reassuring. We felt we had done well to wait over a day, and trust to Southern chivalry.

“Considering everything, I’ll be easy on you. Twenty dollars.”

His tone was so fatherly that I knew only gratitude for being saved from two months in a Texas dungeon.

“Thank you, your Honor,” I faltered.

Outside, Toby looked at me in scorn.

“What did you thank him for?” she asked.

Whether it be contempt of court or no, I wish to state that subsequent inquiry among the hairdressers, hotel clerks, and garage men of Houston, revealed that a fine of such magnitude had never been imposed in the annals of the town. The usual sentence was a rebuke for first offenses, two dollars for the second and so on. The judge was right. I was a stranger——

But what could you expect from a soul of granite who could resist such a mellowing, opportune, side-splitting bon mot?—could swallow it unsaid?

I hope it choked him.

CHAPTER IV

CHIVALRY VS. GUMBO

A GUIDE, who at the age of twelve had in disgust left his native state, once epitomized it to me.

“Texas is a hell of a state. Chock full of socialists, horse-thieves and Baptists.”

Socialists and horse-thieves we did not encounter; it must have been the Baptists, then, who were responsible for the law putting citizens who purchase gasoline on Sunday in the criminal class. Unluckily the easy-going garage man who obligingly gave us all other possible information neglected to tell us of this restriction on Saturday night. Accordingly, when we started on Sunday morning, we had only five gallons and a hundred odd miles to go. We had no desire to meet Houston’s judiciary again.

A little group of advisers gathered to discuss our problem. The road our New York optimist had routed for us as “splendid going all the way” was a sea of mud. Four mule teams could not pull us out, we were told. Three months of steady rain had reduced the State of Texas to a state of “gumbo.” Each man had a tale of encounter and defeat for each road suggested. Each declared the alternatives suggested by the others impossible. But, at last, came one who had “got through” by the Sugarland road the day before. He voiced the definition of a good road in Texas, a definition which we frequently encountered afterward.

“The road’s all right, ef yo’ don’t boag, otherwise you’ll find it kinder rough.”

With this dubious encouragement we started, at nine in the morning, hoping the Baptists further out in the country would grow lenient in the matter of gasoline, as the square of their distance from Houston.

It was a heavenly day, the sun hot and the vibrant blue sky belying the sodden fields and brimming ditches. The country, brown and faintly rolling, under the warmth of the Southern springtime was reminiscent of the Roman Campagna. Song sparrows filled the air with abrupt showers of music, and now and then a bald and black-winged buzzard thudded down into a nearby field. For miles on both sides of the road we saw only black soil soaked and muddy, with rivers for furrows, and only a few brown stalks standing from last year’s cotton or rice crop. The eternal flatness of the country suggested a reason for the astounding height of the loose-jointed Texans we had seen; they had to be tall to make any impression on the landscape. It accounted, too, for their mild, easy-going, unhurried and unhurriable ways. What is the use of haste, when as much landscape as ever still stretches out before one?

Before we reached Sugarland, a lonesome group of houses on what had once been a huge sugar plantation, our misgivings began. Mud in Texas has a different meaning from mud in Massachusetts; it means gumbo, morasses, Sargasso Seas, broken axles, abandoned cars. From the reiteration of the words, “Yo’ may git through, but I think yo’ll boag” we began to realize that it was easier to get into Texas, even through the eye of the police court, than to get out of it.

At Sugarland we took on illicit gasoline and a passenger. He was bound for a barbecue, but volunteered to steer us through a particularly bad spot a mile further. We roused his gloom by a reference to the Blue Laws of Texas.

“Ef this legislatin’ keeps on,” he said, “a man’ll have to git a permit to live with his wife. Texas aint what it used to be. This yere’s a dry, non-gambling county, but this yere town’s the best town in the state.”

We followed his gesture wonderingly toward the lonely cluster of houses, a warehouse, a store, an ex-saloon with the sign badly painted out, and “refreshments” painted in, and the usual group of busy loafers at the store.

“Yes ma’am. It’s a good town. Twice a year on Gawge Washin’ton’s birthday and the Fo’th we hold a barbecue an’ everyone in the county comes. I’m right sorry I cain’t take yo’ ladies along; I’m sure I could show yo’ a good time. Whiskey flows like water, we roast a dozen oxen, and sometimes as much as fifteen thousand dollars will change hands at one crap game. We whoop it up for a week, and then we settle down, and mind the law again.”

Under the guidance of our kindly passenger, we learned a new technique in driving. In first gear, avoiding the deceptively smooth but slimy roadside, we made for the deepest ruts, racing the engine till it left a trail of thick white smoke behind, clinging to the steering wheel, while the heavy car rocked and creaked in the tyrannical grip of the ruts like a ship in the trough of the waves. Without our friend, we never should have got through. He walked ahead, selected the impassable places from those which merely looked so, and beamed, when rocked and bruised from the wheel I steered the good car to comparatively dry land. A little further, where the barbecue began, he bade us a regretful farewell, and requested us to look him up when next we came to Texas.

“I sure would ’a liked to have went to Boston,” he added, “but I aint sure ef I had ’a went theah, whetheh I could ’a understood their brogue.”

Since Houston we had learned the full meaning of Texas optimism. “Roads are splendid, ma’am. I think you’ll git through,” we mentally labeled as “probably passable.” But when we heard, in the same soft, gentle monotone, “Pretty poor roads, ma’am; I think yo’ll boag,” we knew we should “boag”—bog to the hubs in a plaster of Paris cast. At Richmond, where they told us that the roads which Houston had described as “splendid” were quite impassable, we sadly learned that to a Texan, any road twenty miles away is a “splendid road,” ten miles away is “pretty fair,” but at five, “you’ll sure boag.”

Again we faced the probability of progressing only a few miles further on Texas soil, but the town flocked to our aid, told us of two alternate roads, and promptly split into two factions, each claiming we should “boag” if we took the road advised by the other. A friendly soda clerk gained our confidence by asserting he never advised any road he had not traveled personally. He was such a unique change from the rest of Texas that we took his advice and the East Bernard road to Eagle Lake. It was only the fourth change from our original route planned when overlooking the asphalt of New York, and each detour decreased our chances of getting back to the highways. But there was no alternative. The soda clerk as he served us diluted ginger ale, reassured us. “It’s a pretty good road, and ef yo’ don’t boag, I think yo’ll git through.”

We bogged. We came, quite suddenly to a tell-tale stretch of black, spotting the red-brown road, and knew we were in for it. At each foot, we wondered if we should bog in the next. Eliza must have felt the same way, crossing the ice, especially when a cake slipped from under her. As directed, I kept to the ruts. Sometimes they expanded to a three-foot hole, into which the car descended with a heart-rending thump. Once in a rut, it was impossible to get out. The mud, of the consistency of modeling clay, would have made the fortune of a dealer in art supplies. At last, a wrong choice of ruts pulled us into this stiff mass to our hubs, almost wrenching the differential from the car, and we found ourselves stopping. As soon as we stopped, we were done for. We sank deeper and deeper.

We got out, sinking ourselves halfway to the knees in gumbo. We were on a lonely road in an absolutely flat country, with not a house on the horizon. We had no ropes, and no shovel. We looked at the poor car, foundered to her knees in sculptor’s clay, and wondered how many dismal days we must wait before the morass dried.

And then came the first manifestation of a peculiar luck which followed us on our entire trip. Never saving us from catastrophe, it rescued us in the most unlikely fashion, soon after disaster.

Along rode a boy—on horseback—the first person we had seen for hours. We stopped him, and inquired where we could find a mule, a rope and a man. Having started out to make the trip without masculine aid, it chagrined us to have to resort to it at our first difficulty, but we were not foolish enough to believe we could extricate the car unaided from its bed of sticky clay. The boy looked at us, looked at the imprisoned machine, and silently spat. Texas must have a law requiring that rite, with penalties for infringement thereof. We never saw it broken.

The formality over, he replied, “I don’t know.” We suggested planks,—he knew of none. We put him down, bitterly, as an ill-natured dolt. But, as we learned later, Texans move slowly, but their hearts are in the right place. He was only warming up. Finally he spat again, lighted a cigarette, got off his horse, silently untied a rope from his saddle, and bound it about our back wheel, disregarding calmly the mire sucking at his boots. I started the engine. No results. All three watched the fettered Gulliver helplessly. Then, while Toby and I lifted out heavy suitcases and boxes from the seat which held the chains, he watched us, with the mild patience of an ox.

Reinforcements came, a moment later, from a decrepit buggy, containing a boy and two girls. They consulted, on seeing our plight, and the girls, hearty country lasses in bare feet and sunbonnets, urged their escort, apparently to his relief, to stay the Sunday courtship and give us aid. Of more agile fettle than our first knight, he galvanized him into a semblance of motion. Together they gathered brush, and, denuding their horses for the purpose, tied bits of rope to the rear wheels. The engine started, stalled, and started again a dozen times. At last the car stirred a bit from her lethargy, the two boys put their country strength against her broad back and pushed; the engine roared like a man-eating tiger—and we got out.

But we still had to conquer a black stretch of about one hundred yards, in which one of our rescuers had broken an axle, so he cheerfully told us, only yesterday. We were faced with the problem to advance or retreat? Either way was mud. We might get caught between two morasses, and starve to death before the sun dried the roads. We might turn back, but why return to conditions we had worked two hours to escape? We decided to advance boldly, and, if need be, gloriously break an axle. “Race her for all she’s worth,” counseled the livelier of our rescuers, from the running board where he acted as pilot. I raced her, though it nearly broke my heart to mistreat the engine so cruelly. We wavered, struck a rut, and were gripped in it, as in the bonds of matrimony, for better or worse. It led us to a gruesome mass of “soup,” with a yawning hole at the bottom.

“Here’s where I broke my axle,” shouted my pilot. To break the shock meant to stick; to race ahead might mean a shattered car. There was no time to think it over. I pushed down on the gas. A fearful bump, and we went on, the mud sucking at the tires with every inch we advanced. Cheering, the others picked their way to us. Our friends piled our baggage into the tonneau. Toby and I looked at each other, worried by the same problem,—the problem that never ceased to bother us until we reached Chicago;—to tip or not to tip?

They were such nice lads; we already seemed like old friends. Yet they were strangers who had scratched their hands and muddied their clothes, and relinquished cheerfully the Sunday society of their ladies on our behalf. Too much to offer pay for, it seemed too much to accept without offering to pay. We learned then that such an offer outrages neither Western independence nor Southern chivalry when made in frank gratitude and good-fellowship. The first suggestion of payment invariably meets an off-hand but polite refusal, which tact may sometimes change to acceptance. If accepted, it is never as a tip, but as a return for services; offer it as a tip, and you offer an insult to a friend. We found it a good rule, as Americans dealing with Americans, to be graceful enough to play the more difficult role of recipient when we decently could, and in the spirit of the West, “pass it on to the next fellow.”

Eagle Lake seemed as difficult to attain as the treasure beyond seven rivers of fire and seven mountains of glass. An hour’s clear sailing over roads no worse than ploughed fields brought it nearly in sight,—seven miles to go, under a pink sky lighted by a silver crescent. And then Toby, seeing a grassy lake on the side of the road, forsook two tried and trusty mud-holes for it, and ditched us again!

Nearby was a farmhouse, with two men and a Ford standing in the driveway. Hardly had we “boaged,” our wheels churning a pool deep enough to bathe in, when we saw them loading shovels and tools into the car, and driving to our aid. They came with foreboding haste. They greeted us cheerfully—too cheerfully, we thought; joked about the hole, and admitted they spent most of their time shovelling people out. They knew their job—we had to admit that. They wrestled with the jack, setting it on a shovel to keep it from sinking in the swamp; profanely cheerful, fussed over the chains, which we later guiltily discovered were too short for our over-sized tires, backed their car to ours, tied a rope to it, and pulled. We sank deeper. They shoveled, jacked, chopped sage-brush, and commandeered every passing man and car. The leader of the wreckers was a Mr. Poole, a typical Westerner of the old school,—long, flowing gray whiskers, sombrero, and keen watchful face. He had also a delightful sense of humor,—was in fact so cheerful that we became more and more gloomy as we noted the array of Fords and men clustered about. It looked to us like a professional mud-hole.

They hitched two Fords to the car, while eight men pushed from the back, but nothing came of the effort. A fine looking man named Sinclair, with gentle manners, was elected by the crowd to go for his mule team, “the finest pair in the county.” An hour later he came back. He had gone two miles, changed to overalls, and hitched up his mules in the meantime, returning astride the off beast.

At sight of the fallen car, the mules gave a gently ironic side-glance, stepped into place, waited quietly, and at the word of command, stepped forward nonchalantly, while I started the car simultaneously. It took them exactly five minutes to do what eight men, two women, two Fords and a Cadillac had failed to do in two hours’ hard work. For days after, when we passed a mule, we offered him silent homage.

While Toby, looking and acting like a guilty wretch, piled the baggage into the car, I approached Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Poole, who stood watching the rescued leviathan with eyes gleaming satisfaction, and put the usual timid question.

“Will you tell me what I can offer all these people for helping us out?”

Mr. Sinclair, owner of the stalwart mules, smiled and said: “I shouldn’t offer them a thing. We all get into trouble one time or another, and have to be helped out. Just you tell them ‘thank you’ and I reckon that’ll be all the pay they want.”

And before we could turn around to carry out his injunction, half the crowd had melted away!

To all motorists who become “boaged,” I beg to recommend the mud-hole of my friends, Mr. Poole and Mr. Sinclair, of Lissie, Texas.

CHAPTER V

NIBBLING AT THE MAP OF TEXAS

VISITING an ostrich farm is as thrilling as going in wading, but to be thorough, we did our duty by San Antonio’s plumed and gawky giants before starting again on our well-nigh hopeless task of making an impression on the State of Texas.

When we looked at our mileage record we were encouraged, only to be cast down again by a glance at the map, whose south-west corner we had only begun to nibble at in six days’ faithful plodding. It was an incentive to an early start. We filled our tank with gas at the tiled station near the Alamo, rejoicing in the moderate price. In one respect, at least, Texas is the motorists’s paradise. Gasoline is cheap, oil is cheap, storage for the night ranges from “two bits” to half a dollar, while clear weather and local honesty make it possible to avoid even that expense by leaving the car overnight in the Garage of the Blue Sky. Tires are mended and changed for a quarter, and in some places for nothing. And garage-keepers are honest,—except when, yielding to local patriotism, they describe the state of the roads.

For three miles we meandered through San Antonio’s “Cabbage Patch,” steering around tin cans, Mexican babies, and goats taking the freedom of the city, until we came to a fine broad macadam in good repair,—our first real road since the ill-fated stretch outside Houston. Mexicans hung outside their little shops, whose festoons of onions and peppers painted Italy into the landscape. Overhead, we counted dozens of airplanes, some from the government school, others from Katharine Stinson’s modest hangars, making the most of the weather. One coquetted with us, following us for several miles. We leaned out and waved, but at that, it was a most impersonal form of flirtation. Not a quiver of the great wings, not a swoop through the blue, rewarded our abandon. I wish I might record otherwise, for a moment later a rusty nail had flattened our back tire, and we were left alone on the prairie to solve the problem of changing the heavy rims, which our combined strength could hardly lift. How romantic and happy a touch could be added to this narrative if at this point I could state that the airman fluttered to our feet, saluted, changed the tire, and then circled back to the blue. But, doubtless himself from Boston, he did no such thing. He kept steadily on his course, till he was only a speck in our lives. If the cautious man reads this, let him know he is forgiven the tire, but not the climax.

We had been airy, at home, when they mentioned the tires. There were, nevertheless, internal doubts. Massachusetts is too crowded with garages to furnish much practice in wayside repairing, and I had been lucky. But now came the test. Theoretically, we understood the process, but jacks go up when they should go down, nuts rust, and rims warp. We searched the horizon for help, found none, pulled out the tools, and got down in the mud.

Our jack was the kind whose advertisements show an immaculate young lady in white daintily propelling a handle at arm’s length, while the car rises easily in the air. Admitting she has the patience of Job, the strength of Samson, and the ingenuity of the devil, I should like to meet her just long enough to ask her if she stood off at arm’s length while she put the jack in place, rescued it as it toppled over, searched vainly for a solid spot in which the jack would not sink, pulled it out of the mud again, pushed the car off as it rolled back on her, hunted for stones to prop it up, and a place in the axles where the arm would fit, and then had the latch give way and be obliged to do it all over again. And, with no reflections on the veracity of the lady or her inspired advertiser, I should demand the address of her pastor and her laundress.

We worked half an hour jacking up the car. No sooner had we got it where it should be, than the car’s weight sank it in the mud, and we had to begin again our snail process. To my delight, Toby was fascinated by the thing, and from that hour claimed it as her own. We mutually divided the labor as our tastes and talents dictated. It seemed that Toby revelled in handling tools, which dropped from my inept grasp, while my sense of mechanics and experience surpassed hers. I was to be the diagnostician, she the surgeon. In other words, I bossed the job, while she did the work.

While Toby struggled with the jack a Mexican on a flea-bitten cayuse slouched on the horizon. He was black and hairy, and one “six-gun” in his teeth would have signed his portrait as Captain of the Bandits. I stopped him and asked him to lend us his brute strength, which he smilingly did, pleased as a child at being initiated into the sacred mysteries of motoring. When I allowed him to propel the socket-wrench his cup ran over. He did everything backward, but he furnished horse-sense, which we lacked, and when we attempted to lift heavy weights, he courteously supplanted us. The three of us invented a lingua franca in Mexican, Italian, French and musical terms.

“Tire,—avanti!” Gesture of lifting. Groan,—signifying great weight.

“Troppo,—troppo! Largo, largo! Ne faites pas ça! Ah-h, si, si,—bono hombre, multo, multo bono hombre!”

Thus encouraged, he worked willingly and faithfully, and at the end of a half hour’s toil, waved aside our thanks, untied his weary cayuse, and raised his sombrero. He had not robbed us nor beaten us, but had acted as one Christian to another. I ran after him saying fluently, as if I had known the language all my life, “Multo, multo, beaucoup bono hombre.” He showed his brilliant teeth. I offered him money, which he at first refused. “Bono hombre,” I insisted, “Cigarettos!” And so he took it, much pleased. He thoroughly enjoyed the episode. I hope his boss did, when he arrived an hour late. Toby enjoyed the episode, too, and persisted in sending home postcards, on which she spoke of being rescued by a Mexican bandit.

During the morning several little towns,—all alike, flitted by us,—Sabinal, Hondo, Dunlay. At Hondo, where the mud was thickest, we stopped at a little general store for lunch. The proprietor, a tall, vague man, discussed earnestly, as one connoisseur to another, the merits of the various tinned goods he submitted, and after a leisurely chat and several purchases, in which the matter of trade became secondary, he urged on us several painted sticks of candy, a new kind which he said he enjoyed sucking during his solitary guard at the store. After the customary, “You’re a long ways from home,” he bade us goodbye, hopefully but sadly, as one would a consumptive great-aunt about to take a trip to the North Pole, and watched us bump out of sight.

We had twenty miles of such luxuriant mud that we stopped to photograph it. It is only slight exaggeration to say that the ruts came to the camera’s level. Then we forded the Neuces River, a stream woven into early Texan history, and began to climb out of the land of cotton into the grazing country. The herds and herds of sheep and white angora goats we now encountered made a charming landscape but an irritating episode. A large flock of silly sheep rambled halfway to our car, then, frightened, fled in the other direction, turning again with those they met, who also faced and fled, baa-ing; no militia could clear the traffic they disorganized. Each herd we met meant a wasted half hour. Their herders sat their horses in grim patience, with the infinite contempt shepherds get for their charges and for life in general. Out here, “being the goat” takes a new and dignified meaning—for a goat is placed with each hundred sheep to steer the brainless mass, act as leaders in danger, and furnish the one brain of the herd.

These pastoral happenings delayed us, until toward night we climbed dark dunes into a clear golden sunset. Through a gate we entered what seemed to be a cattle track through a large ranch, but was in fact the main highway to El Paso. The roads in this part of the country cut through large holdings, and the pestiferous cattle gate begins to bar the road, necessitating stopping, crossing, shutting the gate again, several times a mile. And let me warn the traveling Easterner that not to leave a gate as you find it is in truth a crime against hospitality, for one is often on private property.

Queer blunt mesas rose on all sides of us, and when dark came upon us we had entered a small canyon, and were winding to the top and down again out of the hills. The cattlegates and rocky road made going slow, and as Venus, frosty and brilliant, came out, we were imprisoned in this weirdly gloomy spot, on the top of the world. A quaver in Toby’s usually stalwart voice made me wonder if she were remembering her mother’s last words,—“Don’t drive at night.” This is no reflection on Toby’s staunchness; the immensity of the West, after dark, when first it looms above one used to the coziness of ordered streets, must always seem portentous and awful. We hastened on, winding down through one enchanting glade after another, till we met the highway again. Toby took the wheel, and we hummed along. Suddenly a stone struck the engine, and a deafening roar like that of an express train frightened us. Something vital, by its clatter, had been shattered, and we again faced the possibility of delay and frustration—even retreat. We got out and searched for the trouble. Luckily we had that day unpacked our flash-light, for Venus, though she looked near enough to pick out of the sky, furnished poor illumination for engine troubles. Search revealed an important looking pipe beneath the car broken in two, with a jagged fracture. Should we chance driving on, or camp till morning?

We were tired and our pick-up lunch of deviled ham and crackers seemed long ago. After a hard day’s run, the difficulties of making camp in the dark, with our equipment still unpacked, and going cold and supperless to bed loomed large. Besides, there could not have been worse camping ground in the world. Soggy cotton fields under water on both sides gave us the choice of sleeping in the middle of the road or on the back seat piled high with baggage. The engine, though roaring like a wounded lioness, still ran steadily. I knew just enough to realize we had broken the exhaust pipe, but hardly enough to know whether running the car under such conditions would maim it for life. But though hunger won out, the real mechanic’s love for his engine was born in us, and feeling like parents who submit their only child to a major operation, we drove painfully at eight miles an hour the ten miles into B——, the town echoing to our coming.

The village was a mere cross-roads, a most unlikely place for a night’s stop, picturesque and Mexican, with low ’dobe houses, yellow and pink, the noise of a phonograph from each corner, and lighted doorways filled with slouching Mexicans and trig American doughboys from a nearby camp,—and everywhere else, Rembrantian gloom. At a new tin garage with the universal Henry’s name over the door we were relieved to learn we had done no damage. Most of the cars in town had, in fact, broken their exhaust pipes on loose stones, and ran chugging, as we had.

It is not usual for garage helpers to aid strange ladies in hunting a night’s lodging, but ours willingly let themselves be commandeered for the purpose, and the chase began. The town had a “hotel”;—which, in the South, may be a one-story café, or something less ambitious. This one, kept by a negro woman, was more than dubious looking, but when the proprietor said it was “full up,” our hearts sank. We wearily made the rounds of the village, guided by rumors of a vacant room here or there, only to find the houses, four-roomed cottages at best, filled with army wives. Our needs reduced us to Bolshevism. Passing an imposing white house, neat as wax, and two stories high, we sent our cicerone to demand for us lodging for the night. Had it been the official White House we should have done no less, and as the residence of the owner of the garage where our cripple was stored it gave us a claim on his hospitality no right-minded citizen could deny. Alas, we learned that Mr. V’s eleven hostages to fortune, rather than civic pride, accounted for the size of his house. The owner sent us a cordially regretful message that his bedrooms teemed with little V’s, but thought his brother’s daughter might take the strangers in, as her parents were away and their room vacant.

A little figure in a nightgown opened the door a crack when we knocked at their cottage.

“Who is it?” asked a Southern voice, timidly.

“Two ladies from Boston, who would like a room for the night.” We threw as much respectable matronliness as possible into our own voices. The magic word “Boston” reassured. Boston may be a dishonored prophet in Cambridge and Brookline, but to the South and West it remains autocrat of the breakfast table. I know our prospective hostess, from the respect and relief in her tones, visualized Louisa May Alcott and Julia Ward Howe waiting on her doorstep, and she hastened to throw open the door to what we saw was her bedroom, saying “Come in! You’re a long ways——”

Boston, your stay-at-homes never realize how distant, how remote and fabulous your rock-bound shores seem to the Other Half west of the Mississippi!

It was a German Lutheran household into which we stepped. Two little tow-headed boys were curled up asleep in their sister’s room, and we tip-toed past to the parents’ vacated bedroom, ours for the night, with its mottoes, its lithographed Christ on the wall, its stove and tightly shut windows. This German family had brought over old-world peasant habits, and curiously contrasted against its bareness, promiscuity and not over scrupulous cleanliness was the American daughter who needed but a little more polish to be ready for any rung in the social ladder. She was a real little lady, as hospitable as though we had been really invited.

Supperless, footsore and weary, we tumbled into the sheets vacated by the elder V’s that morning, too grateful for shelter and the softness of the feather bed to feel squeamish. We waked in the sunshine of next morning to smell coffee brewing on our bedroom stove, and hear cautious whispers of two sturdy little Deutschers tip-toeing back and forth through our room to the wash-shed beyond, stealing awed glances at the Boston ladies in their mother’s bed. In a stage whisper one called to his sister to learn where “the comb” was. She answered that Pa had taken it to San Anton’, but after some search found them “the brush” hidden near father’s notary stamp, on the bureau,—for the father was the local judge and a man much respected in the community.

When the little boys departed for school, she brought us coffee in the best china, apologizing for not offering us breakfast. She explained that she was to be married in three days, and was following her family to San Anton’ for the wedding. She showed us her ring, and her trousseau, all in pink, to her joy, and told us of her fiancé, who had been a second lieutenant in France. Though she seemed a child, she had refused to marry him when he left, because she believed haste at such times imprudent. And now she was all excitement over the great event, yet not too much to show a welcome as simple as it was beautiful to the midnight intruders from Boston.

As usual, our desire to pay for our lodging met a firm, almost shocked refusal. We only felt more nearly even when at El Paso we sent her something deliciously pink for her trousseau.

In Texas, overnight promises are to be discounted. Or is it not, perhaps, a universal law of the “night man” to pass on no information to the “day man?” Has the order taken a vow of silence more binding and terrible than the Dominican friars? It must be so, for never in ten years’ experience with night men, have I known one to break the seal of secrecy which prevents them letting your confidence in the matter of flat tires and empty tanks go any further. Their delicacy in keeping all news of such infirmities from the ears of the day man is universal. Nor was there any exception next morning, when we visited our garage, hopeful of an early start. The exhaust pipe was still unwelded, and our spare tire still flat. Furthermore, we were half an hour in the garage before anyone thought to mention that the resources of the place were inadequate to mend the pipe. They had trusted to our divining the fact, as the day wore on,—a more tactful way of breaking the news than coming out bluntly with the truth.

At last, a passing stranger suggested we take the car to the nearby Fort, where a new welding machine had recently been installed. We chugged up the hill, attracting the notice of several soldiers from East Boston, on whom our Massachusetts number produced a wave of nostalgia. By this time, so used were we to being beneficiaries of entire strangers that before hailing anyone likely to offer to do us a favor, we fixed smiles fairly dripping with saccharine on our faces.

A sergeant, hearing sympathetically our story, sent us to a lieutenant. He wavered.

“I hate not to oblige a lady, ma’am, but this is government property, and we aint allowed to do outside work.”

Looking at his stern face, we decided it would take at least an hour to win him over. Without moving a muscle he continued——

“But, seein’ as you’re a lady and a long ways from home, and can’t git accommodated otherwise, you run your car back to the garage and I’ll send a sergeant down to get the part, and he’ll have it welded for you in a couple of hours.”

Two hours later not only the sergeant but the lieutenant were at the garage to see that the part went back properly into the engine. Meanwhile, doubting the ethics of letting Uncle Sam be our mechanic, we had provided two boxes of Camels for our benefactors, having learned that cigarettes will often be acceptable where money will not. The part was perfectly welded, the sergeant replaced it with military efficiency, and then we exchanged confidences. The lieutenant told us he was a “long-horn,” but had been, before the war, a foreman in the very factory which had built our car. Which explained his cordiality, if explanation were needed in a land where everyone is cordial. We found that respect for the sterling worth of our car helped us along our way appreciably,—people everywhere approved it as “a good car,” and extended their approval to its inmates. The lieutenant nonplused us by refusing both pay and tobacco, but indicated that we might bestow both on the sergeant. He asked us to let him know when we came again to Texas, and we promised willingly, thanked Uncle Sam for his chivalry by proxy, and were quickly on our way to Del Rio. Texas had not yet failed us.

CHAPTER VI

“DOWN BY THE RIO GRANDE”

EVERY thriving Western town, if its politics are right, looks down on its hotels and up to its post-office. Del Rio was no exception; her granite post-office, imposing enough for three towns of its size, suggested Congressional sensitiveness to fences, while down street a block or two, the weather-beaten boards of “Frank’s,” with its creaking verandahs and uncarpeted lobby, printed the earlier pages of the little settlement, which, straddling the river from Mexico, had become the nucleus for frontier trade eddying to its banks.

It is true that other hotels, of the spick and span brick ugliness the New West delights in, flanked the motion picture houses and drug-stores, but we chose Frank’s, the oldest inhabitant,—a type of hotel fast becoming extinct. Downstairs, plain sheathing; upstairs the same. Our bedroom opened on a veranda which we had to traverse to reach the bath. It was a novelty to us, but the traveling salesman next door took it casually enough,—or else he had forgotten to pack his bath-robe.

Our hostess was the first of a long list of ladies young and old we were to meet, who knew well the gentle art of twirling a toothpick while she talked. Perhaps it is the badge of a waitress in these parts, like a fresh bush over ancient wine-houses, a silent, but eloquent testimonial to the gustatory treats of the hotel. I think we never met, from now on, a waitress in Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, who was not thus equipped. Ours did not flourish hers in vain. The flakiness of the biscuits, the fragrance of the wild honey, and the melting deliciousness of the river fish, caught fresh in the Rio Grande an hour before, caused us to see Del Rio with happy eyes. To this day, Toby speaks of it as if it were the third finest metropolis of the West, which must be attributed entirely to the seven biscuits which floated to her hungry mouth. I might as well admit at once our tendency, which I suspect other travelers share, to grade a town by the food it served.

I suspect that Del Rio, to one unfed, would seem a commonplace hamlet, save for its interest as a border settlement. Mexico, three miles away, held out the charm of a forbidden land. We circled next morning to its border, past thatched shanties of Mexicans and negroes, and took a glance at the desolate land beyond, barren, thorny, rolling away to faint blue hills. A camp of United States soldiers lay athwart our path, and two alert soldiers with a grin and a rifle apiece barred our progress.

Toby had been keen to cross the line, but when she saw them she said characteristically, “Mexico seems to me vastly overrated.” So ignoring the khaki, of our own free will and choice we turned back. I confess I was relieved. Toby has the post card habit to such an extent that I was prepared to have to fight our way across the border, dodging bullets and bandits, so that she might mail nonchalant cards to her friends, beginning, “We have just dropped into Mexico.”

Our curiosity as to Mexico gave us an early start. Soon we were on a high plateau, all the world rolling below us. Soft brown hills led out to faint blue mountains outlined on the horizon. With a thrill we realized we were viewing the beginnings of the Rockies. For the first time in my life, I felt I had all the room I wanted. We basked in the hot sun, expanding physically and spiritually in the immensity of the uncrowded landscape. The air in this high altitude was bracing, but not cold. From time to time we passed prosperous flocks of sheep, spotted with lively black goats. Occasionally a lonely group of steers held out against the encroaching mutton. We shared with them the state of Texas. At Comstock, a flat and uninteresting one-street town, we lunched, forgetting entirely to make a four-mile detour to view the highest bridge in the world. All day, we bent our energies to covering another half inch on the interminable map of Texas. We passed our last stopping place for the night. There was too much outdoors to waste; we decided to make our first camp in a live-oak grove somebody had described to us.

With a sense of adventure, we purchased supplies for our supper and breakfast at a little town we reached at glowing sundown. The grocery was closed, but the amiable proprietor left his house and opened his store for us. Rumors of deep sand ahead disturbed us, and against the emergency we purchased for “seven bits” a shovel which came jointed, so that it could be kept in the tool box under the seat. The fact that it was so short that it could easily repose there at full length did not mar our delight at this novel trick. It had the elemental charm for us of a toy which will do two things at once,—a charm which in other eras accounted for the vogue of poison rings, folding beds, celluloid collars and divided skirts. It was a perfectly useless little shovel, which made us happy whenever we looked at it, and swear whenever we used it.

Thus fortified we sped on, and it soon became pitch dark, and a windy night. The country suddenly stood on end, and we coasted down a surprising little canyon, to emerge into a long black road tangled with mesquite on both sides. When we almost despaired of finding a suitable camp, we came casually on a snug little grove, and heard nearby the rush of a stream. The black sky was radiant with stars. Orion stood on his head, and so did the dipper, surrounded by constellations unfamiliar to our Northern eyes.

In the chill dark we felt for a spot to pitch our tent. Spiky mesquite caught and tore our hair nets. Texas’ millions of untenanted acres brooded over our human unimportance, till a charred stick or empty tin can, stumbled over in the dark, became as welcome a signal as Friday’s footprint to Crusoe. Jointing our useless little spade, we dug a trench in the soft sand for our hips to rest in, hoisted our tent-rope over a thorny branch, folded blanket-wise our auto robes, undressed and crept inside our house. The lamps of the car gave us light to stow away our belongings, and its lumbering sides screened us from the road. With a sense of elation we looked at the circling stars through our tent windows, and heard the wind rise in gusts through the bare branches. The world becomes less fearsome with a roof over one’s head.

Dawn is the camper’s hour of trial. I woke from a dream that a mountain lion had entered our shelter, when Toby sat up excitedly.

“I just dreamed a bear was trying to get in,” she said. The coincidence was forboding, yet no menagerie appeared. Our aching hips, tumbled bedding and chilled bodies made us dread the long hours to breakfast. Toby hinted I had my share and more of the blanket. I had long entertained a similar suspicion of her, but was too noble to mention it. We portioned out the bedding afresh, vowed we never again would camp out, and in a moment it was eight o’clock of a cold, foggy morning.

Yesterday the sun had been hot enough to blister Toby’s cheek. Today was like a nor’-easter off Labrador. We were too cold to get up, and too cold to stay shivering in the tent. It seemed a stalemate which might last a life-time, when suddenly indecision crystallized, exploded, and we found ourselves on the verge of the ice-cold stream compromising cleanliness with comfort.

How different seems the same folding stove viewed on the fifth floor of a sporting goods store in New York, and in the windy open. Piffling and futile it appeared to us, its natural inadequacy increased by our discovery that our fuel cans were locked in our trunk, and the lock had become twisted. It further appeared that most of our cooking outfit was interned in the same trunk. Accordingly I tried to build a fire, while Toby took down the tent. Camp cooking is an art which I shall not profane by describing our attempts to get breakfast that bleak morning. The fire smouldered, but refused to break into the bright cheery crackle one hears about, and finally, untempted by the logs of green mesquite we hopefully fed it, went out entirely. We breakfasted on the remains of last night’s supper, washed down with a curious sticky mixture made of some labor-saving coffee preparation. Realizing that it took more than the outfit to make good campers, we went our subdued way. Our water bag bumped on the running-board, falling off frequently, and once we retraced ten muddy miles to retrieve it.

It was not a lucky day. Our scant breakfast, lost waterbag and an unhappy lunch, our locked trunk and all, were but the-precursors of a worse afternoon. The air was thick with yellow dust, and the western sky, sickly green, showed columns of whirling, eddying sand to right or left of us. Though we followed the Southern Pacific with dog-like devotion we lost our way once in a crooked maze of wagon tracks which led us to a swamp, and had to drive back ten miles to the nearest house to ask directions. To make up for lost time, in the bitter, reckless mood every driver knows, when nobody in the car dare speak to him, I raced for two hours at forty-five, through sandy, twisting tracks, with the car rocking like a London bus, and Toby clinging to the side, not daring to remonstrate, for it was she who had lost us our way. Each turn was a gamble, but the curves were just gentle enough to hold us to our course.

OUR FIRST CAMP, TEXAS.

“I tried to build a fire.”

We had every chance of making our night’s stop before dark, when the air oozed gently out of the rear tire. Behind us a sandstorm rising in a shifting golden haze lifted twisted columns against the vivid green sky, over which dramatic dark clouds drove, while a spectacular sunset lighted the chains of cold dark blue and transparent mauve mountains on both sides. It was a glorious but ominous sight, and the tire meant delay. A flat tire, however, acts on Toby like a bath on a canary. The jack holds no mysteries for her, and tire rims click into place at sound of her voice. And our peculiar luck had halted us within a few yards of the only house we had passed all afternoon. Having learned that frail womanhood need neither toil nor spin in Texas, I was for seeking aid, but Toby scorned help, and so painted the joys of independence that though it was hot and dusty and the sand storm threatened, I bent to her will. And the next moment, the key which locked engine, tool-box and spare tire, broke off in the padlock. As I had with unprecedented prudence bought a duplicate in New York, we were not completely stranded, but that, I mentioned bitterly to Toby, was no fault of hers. Only a cold chisel could release the spare tire, and we found we had none.

“I will now go for help,” I said to Toby who was defiantly pretending to do something to the locked tire with a hammer, “as I should have at first but for your foolish pride.”

As stately as I might with hair blown by the wind, yellow goggles, leather coat and a purple muffler tied over my hat, I retreated toward the ranch-house. In the kitchen I startled a grizzled old couple sitting near the fire. When I explained our predicament, and begged the loan of a cold chisel the old man asked, “You two girls all alone?”

When I admitted we were, he called to his son in the next room, “Horace, go see what you can do for the ladies.”

More bashful than most Texans, the lank Horace followed me in painful silence for a few yards. Then in a burst of confidence, he said, “When you come in just now, I thought it was maw dressed up to fool us. Yes, sir, I sure did.”

My glimpse of his septuagenarian parent would not have led me to suspect her of such prankishness, but appearances are often deceitful. For all I knew she may have been just the life of the family, doubling up Horace and his paw in long writhes of helpless mirth at her impersonations. So I accepted the compliment silently and led our rescuer to the car.

Once more I triumphed unworthily over Toby. For she had hinted that my fast driving had flattened the tire, but investigation revealed a crooked nail,—the bane of motoring in a cattle country. Horace proved most business-like in handling tools. In less than half an hour, bashfully spurred on by our admiration, he had cut the lock and helped us change the tire. Then he saw our sign,—and said it. As if it were a thought new-born to the ages, he smiled at his own conceit, and remarked, “You’re a lawng ways from home!”

As Horace did not smoke, we drove away from the ranch-house eternally in his debt. We put him down to the credit of Texas, however, where he helped off-set sand-storms and mud holes, and added him to the fast growing list of cavaliers who had rescued us from our folly. The storm had died, and with it our bad luck had apparently departed, but when a day begins badly, it is never safe to predict until the car is bedded down for the night. According to a bad habit she has, Toby telescoped two paragraphs of the route card, skipping the middle entirely. Consequently we turned left when we should have gone right,—and found our front wheels banked where a road had been playfully altered by the wind to a mountain of sand. On all sides were waist-high drifts of fine white sea sand, from which the tops of mesquite bushes showed. We could not turn, so we tried running straight ahead,—and stuck. Twilight had fallen, and if there were a way out, it was no longer discernible. At what seemed a short half mile, a light gleamed from a house. Once more, I cravenly went for help, while the optimistic Toby began to shovel sand with our toy shovel. The half mile trebled itself, and still the house was no nearer. At last I came to the end, only to find that a wide canal separated us and the car from the road. I shouted across to two men in a corral, and at last they heard and came to the edge of the canal while I asked to borrow a rope. They debated a while, perhaps doubting my intentions, but finally threw a rope in the back of a little car, cranked it and, coming to the bank of the canal, helped me across. Unlike a Westerner who when he leaves a spot never fails to orient himself, I had not noticed in which direction I had struck out from the car. I fear my deliverers thought me a mild kind of incompetent when I confessed I had no idea where to find it: darkness and sand dunes completely hid it from sight. But after some skirmishing about canal beds and bridges, we reached the broad shape looming up in the dark, and found that Toby had dug the car out, wrapped an old tire about the spinning back wheel, and driven it on firm ground.

Our rescuers put us on the road to our night’s objective, and with mild patience told us we could hardly miss it, it being a straight road all the way. They did not compliment us too highly, for by the time Venus had risen we reached the hotel, kept by a sad, distrustful one-eyed man from Maine, who in spite of twenty years’ residence still abhorred Texas as a desert. He fed us liberally with baked beans and apple pie before showing us to a bare, clean little room furnished with a tin basin and a patchwork quilt.

We were nearly dead. We had much with which to reproach luck and each other, but by mutual consent postponed it and sank into peaceful sleep in the lumpy bed.

As somebody said, luck is a fickle dame. Having flouted us to her heart’s content, she tagged docilely at our heels as we started for El Paso next morning. Two hundred miles away, the average run was ten hour’s time, but we made it in eight and a half. The garage-man’s wife’s cousin was a dentist on Huntington Avenue, and the extraordinary coincidence drew her to us almost as by the bonds of kinship. She hurried her spouse into mending our tires promptly, and speeding us on our way with valuable directions. It was ten when we left, but moving westward into Rocky Mountain time saved us an hour.

Once out of the village we encountered the enveloping desert again. Driving in those sandy tracks became a new sport,—we learned to make the sand skid us around corners without decreasing our speed; we could calculate with nicety when a perceptible drag on the wheels warned us to shift gears. And then they must be shifted instantly, for at a moment’s delay the car sank deep, and mischief was done which only shoveling could undo. Once we found ourselves facing another car blocking the road, and sunk in thick, unpacked sand. We could not turn out, and the instant’s stop put us in a like predicament. They wistfully asked us to pull them out, but as we were heavier than they, and would have made two obstacles instead of one in the road, we had to refuse the only help asked of us, who had so many times been the beneficiaries. We left them to an approaching mule team, after they had returned good for evil by pushing us out of the sand. For twenty miles we had hard going, but by spinning through the sand in low gear we escaped trouble.

We were still in the desert, but serrated peaks with lovely outlines and stormy, snowy tops marched beside us the entire day. The aspect of the country became semi-tropical. The single varieties of cactus and century plants were increased to dozens. The ocotillo, sometimes wrongly called octopus cactus, waved slender green fingers, on which a red bud showed like a rosy fingernail. The landscape warmed from lifeless gray to gold, mauve, blue and deep purple, and always on our left were the benign outlines of the blue Davis Mountains. We mounted higher and higher on a smooth orange road cut through the mountains and came out on a broad open highway with wide vistas. Close by, the mountains looked like huge heaps of black cinder and silt, but distance thinned them, as if cut from paper, into translucent lavender and blue, the edges luminous from the setting sun.

Thirty miles out of El Paso we were astonished to find ourselves on a concrete road in perfect museum condition, on which in dismal file many cars crept city-ward at the discreet pace of fifteen miles an hour. It was the first bit of good road Toby had encountered for days but an uncanny something in the self-restraint of the El Pasans on the only good road in Texas recalled Houston to us. We joined the funereal procession and arrived in the city without official escort.

Mexico in this southwest corner is merged with Texas, making gay its vast grayness with bright spots of color and slouching figures, and suggesting other-world civilization by its Spanish street signs, and the frankness with which the Latin welcomes the world to the details of his daily life. The outskirts of the town were lined with one story ’dobe huts, and even more fragile shelters made of wattled reeds and mud. Forlorn little Mexican cafés, with temperance signs brazening it out above older and more convivial invitations, failed of their purpose; their purple and blue doors were empty as the be-Sundayed crowds swarmed the streets.

El Paso has its charms, but to us it was too modern and too large to mean more than a convenient place to sleep, shop and have the car overhauled, and the gumbo of Texas, now caked until it had to be chipped off with a chisel, washed from its surface. “The old lady,” as Toby nick-named the car, was to leave Texas as she had entered it,—with clean skirts. Once more we viewed her gray paint, which we had not seen for many a long day. She seemed to feel the difference from her former draggle-tailed state; she pranced a bit, and lightened by several hundred-weight of mud, shied around corners. We gave her her head as we passed the great smelters on the western edge of the town, whose smoke stacks cloud the rims of the mountains they are attacking, and slowly, slowly eating into. A smooth macadam road led us,—at last!—out of Texas. We were not sorry to leave, hospitably as we had been treated. Ahead lay greater miracles of nature than Texas could offer, and adventure no less. The great prairie of which in two weeks we had only nibbled one corner was behind us. We were fairly embarked on the main objectives of our journey.

CHAPTER VII

SANDSTORMS, BANDITS AND DEAD SOLDIERS

ALONG a macadam road fringed with bright painted little Mexican taverns and shops, toward mid-afternoon we threaded our way, still defenseless “ladies,” tempting fate. I mention what might seem an obvious fact, because the continuance of our unprotected state required strong powers of resistance against the offers of itinerant chauffeurs, anxious to get from somewhere to anywhere, filled like ourselves with spring stirrings toward Vagabondia, and seeing in our Red Duchess inconsequence an opportunity to get their itching hands on the wheel of a car which made of driving not a chore but an art. Even garage helpers, who now humbly washed wheels and handed tools to mechanics, hoping to end their apprenticeship by a bold stroke, besieged us with offers to chauffeur us for their expenses.

As we were leaving El Paso, I returned to the car to find Toby conversing with a likely looking lad. This did not surprise me, for whenever I came back to Toby after five minutes’ absence, I found her incurable friendliness had collected from one to half a dozen strangers with whom she seemed on intimate terms. But I was surprised to hear this lad urging us to take him as chauffeur as far as Tucson. His frank face and pleasant manner and an army wound seemed as good references as his offer of a bank president’s guarantee. He wanted to go so badly!

I have a failing,—one, at least,—of wanting to live up to what is expected of me. If a stranger with an expensive gold brick shows any real determination to bestow it on me for a consideration, he always finds me eager to cooperate, not because I do not know I am being gulled, but that I hate to cross him when his heart is set on it. Even in dour Boston it is congenitally hard for me to say “No,” but in Texas where people smile painlessly and the skies are molten turquoise, it is next to impossible. Of course, we might take him as far as Tucson. We would have to give up driving, which we both loved. And pay his expenses. One of us would have to sit in the back seat, and be pulverized by jolting baggage. Still, it didn’t seem right to leave our new friend at El Paso, which of all places bored him most. Would Toby be fair, and sit among the baggage half the time?

Toby, I saw, was wondering the same of me. That decided it. Toby loves her comfort. I started to say, “I suppose we might,” when she countered, “But we don’t want any chauffeur.”

He looked hopefully at me, recognizing the weaker will.

“No,” I said, glad to agree with Toby, “that is perfectly true. In fact the whole point of our trip is to see if we can get along without a chauffeur.”

It was the point; his wistful smile had been so persuasive that I had almost forgotten it. Fortunately this reason convinced him without further arguing. He gave us directions about our route, and we left him, hat off, smiling and waving us bon voyage.

Crossing a state line is an adventure in itself. Even with no apparent difference of landscape there seems inevitably a change, if only the slight psychological variance reflected by any country whose people are marked off from their neighbors by differences however slight. The universe reflects many distinctions, I firmly believe, so subtle as to be undefined by our five senses, which we note with that sixth sense finer than any. Their intangible flavor piques the analyst to the nice game of description. Hardly had we crossed the political line dividing sand and sage brush from sage brush and sand before we sensed New Mexico;—a new wildness, a hint of lawlessness, a decade nearer the frontier, Old Spain enameled on the wilderness.

Or perhaps it was only Mrs. Flanagan, with her Mexican face and Irish brogue, when we stopped to buy gas, whose longing to have us for guests at her hotel made her paint the dangers of New Mexico with Hibernian fluency and Iberian guile. She thickened the coming twilight with sand storms, bandit shapes and murders.

“Do ye know what a sandstor’rm is in these parts? Ye do not! I thought not! Last month a car left here to cross the desert to Deming, as ye’re doing. Late afternoon it was,—just this hour, the wind in the same place. I war’rned thim to stay, but they w’d be gettin’ along,—like yourselves.”

“And what became of them?”

She gave us a look that froze the blood in our veins, despite the scorching wind from the edge of the desert.

“Yes, what did become av thim? That’s what many would like to know. They have not been heard of since!”

“You would advise us to stay here for the night, then?”

“Suit yourselves, suit yourselves. I see your rad-aytor’s leakin’. ’Tis a serious thing to get out in that desert, miles fr’m anywhere wid an impty rad-ayator. What could ye do, an’ night comin’ on? Ye’re hilpless! An’ suppose ye get lost? The road’s not marked. ’Tis a mass of criss-cross tracks leadin’ iverywhere. At best, ye’d have to stop where ye are till mornin’, if ye don’t git too far lost ever t’ find y’rselves again.”

Here entered a Gentleman from Philadelphia, a traveler for Quaker Oats, who listened to our debate with great interest. He was a brisk and businesslike young man, with a friendly brown eye and a brotherly manner.

“If you ask me, Mrs. Flanagan,” he began diplomatically, “I’d advise the young ladies to take a chance. I think they can make it.”

Something in this advice, slightly stressed, implied a warning. Mrs. Flanagan with her swarthy Mexican features was not the most prepossessing landlady in the world, nor did a lonely roadhouse on the edge of the desert, with no other guests than ourselves, promise complete security. Tales of Swiss inns, and trap-doors yawning at midnight came to me, faintly conveyed by the young man’s tones. She turned on him with ill-concealed anger.

“It’s nothin’ to me, go or stay. But here’s a good hotel,—with a bath-room, even,—and there’s night, and sandy roads, and a stor’rm comin’. If ye had a man wid ye, I’d say ‘go on,’ though it’s not safe, even f’r a man. But bein’ two ladies, I say stop here.”

We wavered, anxious to get on, but not to meet a violent end. On the pretext of filling our water-bag, the Gentleman from Philadelphia took us aside.

“Don’t let Mrs. Flanagan fool you,” he advised. “She only wants customers. I stayed here once,” he twitched nervously,—“and I’d rather run the chance of being robbed and murdered. Not that I think that will happen to you.”

So we thanked him, nice brisk, friendly young man that he was, taking care not to incriminate him before the watchful Mrs. Flanagan, and bade that lady adieu. She gloomily wished us good luck, but it was apparently more than she dared hope.

“Only last week, two men were held up and murdered by the Mexicans,” she called after us. “Watch out for thim Mexicans,—they’re a wicked bad lot.”

With the sky yellow-green from the gathering sand-storm, night coming on fast and her warning in our ears we struck out into our first desert with a sense of uneasiness, exhilarated a little by the warm beauty of the evening. We seemed to have left all civilization behind, although after passing the last hamlet about nightfall, we had only forty-odd miles more to go. Never shall I forget the eerie charm of that drive. We saw not a soul. Occasionally a jack rabbit, startled as ourselves, leaped athwart the gleam of our lamps. Sometimes we wandered, in the pitchy black, from the guiding Southern Pacific into a maze of twisting trails. Sometimes we dived into a sudden arroyo, wrenching the car about just in time to stay with the road as it serpentined out again. When, now and again, a lonely light far off suggested a lurking bandit, we remembered with a homesick twinge the last words of Toby’s mother, and wondered when we should get a chance to obey them. At four cross roads, the only guide post lay flat midway between the roads. We were obliged to guess at the most likely route. At last we came on the lights of Deming, five miles away, in the valley. We sighed with relief and moved toward them rapidly.

And then a figure stepped out from a truck blocked beside the road, and a deep voice called “Stop a moment, please!”

At that moment we sincerely wished ourselves back in Mrs. Flanagan’s road house. Then, before Toby could get out the monkey wrench which was our sole weapon of defense, the voice changed shrilly on a high note, and we saw our bandit was a fourteen year old boy. He hopped aboard, never dreaming of the panic he had caused our bandit-beset minds, explaining that his batteries were out of order, and he must return to Deming. He added, naïvely, that his father owned the second best hotel in town, which he recommended if we failed to find a room in the best hotel. Then he swung off the car, and we went on to the Mecca of all Western voyagers,—a clean room, a hot bath, and a Harvey eating house.

Like all of the Southwest, Deming was in the midst of an oil boom. Beneath the arid sand and cactus of long unwanted acreage, rich sluggish pools were in hiding, arousing the old gambling spirit of the West. It was a timid soul indeed who had not invested in at least one well. In newspaper offices we saw the day’s quotations chalked on blackboards, and in the windows of real estate agents were greeted by imposing sketches of Deming Twenty Years from Now; no longer half a dozen streets completely surrounded by whirling sand, but a city of oil shafts and sky scrapers. We dropped into a hairdresser’s to be rid of the desert dust, and found a group of ladies as busily discussing oil as were their husbands at the barber’s.

“Jim and I had five hundred dollars saved toward a house,” confided one gray-haired gambler, “so we bought Bear Cat at a cent a share. If it goes to a dollar, like the land next it, we’ve got fifty thousand. If it don’t, why, what can you get with five hundred anyway, these days?”

“Way I do is to buy some of everything,” said the hairdresser, rubbing the lather into my scalp. “Then you’re sure to hit it right. I got a claim out to Stein’s, and they’re striking oil all around. When they find it on my claim,”—(it is always “when,” never “if”)—I’m going to have a rope of pearls to my waist, and a Colonial Adobe house,—twenty rooms and a dance hall.”

We left the little town, hideous in its barrenness and dreaming of its future, the waitresses chewing the inevitable toothpick, the two motion picture houses, the sandstorms, and the railway with its transcontinental standards, and hastened through to Arizona, leaving a more thorough inspection of New Mexico for spring. At the garage, we had one word of advice from a weather beaten old-timer, of whom we inquired as to roads.

“The w’ust trouble ye’ll have in a prohibition state is tire trouble.”

“Why should prohibition affect our tires?”

“Dead soldiers.”

“Dead soldiers?”

“Empty whiskey bottles.”

When we looked back half a mile down the road, he was still laughing at his wit. What would have happened if the really good one about our being a long way from home had occurred to him I cannot picture.

Two routes offered for Tucson; the short cut through Lordsburg and Willcox, and the longer way by Douglas and the Mexican border. When we inquired which route would have more interesting scenery, we had met invariably with a stare and a laugh.

“Not much scenery, wherever you go,—sand and cactus! Just as much on one road as another.”

We therefore chose the shorter way, to learn later that the Douglas-Bisbe route which we discarded was one of the most beautiful drives in the country. Yet we ourselves moved into a theater of loveliness. Saw-toothed ranges, high and stormy, snow-topped, shadowed our trail. The wide amphitheater of our golden valley was encircled with mountains of every size and color; blue, rosy, purple, and at sunset pure gold and transparently radiant. The gray sage turned at sun-down to lavender; mauve shadows lengthened on the desert floor; gorges of angry orange and red cliffs gave savage contrast to the delicate Alpine glow lighting white peaks; a cold, pastel sky framed a solitary star, and frosty air, thinned in its half-mile height to a stimulating sharpness, woke us keenly to life. We felt the enchantment that Arizona weaves from her gray cocoon toward sunset, and wondered at eyes which could look on it all, and see only sand and cactus. Show them the unaccustomed, and they would doubtless have been appreciative enough. A green New England farm with running brooks and blossoming orchards would have spelled Paradise to them, as this Persian pattern of desert did to us; beauty to the parched native of Arizona is an irrigation ditch, bordered by emerald cottonwoods.

If I tint these pages with too many sunsets, it is not from unawareness of my weakness, but because without them a description of Arizona does not describe. In the afternoon hours, between four and eight, the country wakes and glows, and has its moment, like a woman whose youth was plain but whom middle age has touched with charm and mystery. Not to speak of the sunsets of Arizona, till the reader is as saturated with their glory as is the traveler, is to leave the heart of the country unrevealed.

From Willcox to Lordsburg we realized there was more than jest in the remark of our old-timer concerning “dead soldiers.” All the way through that uninhabited desert, we picked our road through avenues of discarded flat bottles of familiar shape, turning all shades of amethyst under the burning rays of the sun. It is an odd effect of the sun on glass here in the desert that it slowly turns a deeper and deeper violet. The desert-wise can tell the date a bottle was discarded from its hue. I was told that one man made a fortune by ripening window-glass in this manner, and selling it to opticians at a fancy price. It may have been a similar industry which lined our path with empty bottles. It must have been so, for Arizona had been “dry” for three years.

Even the lakes were dry. When we met with the term “dry lake” in the guide book, we set it down as another flight of the fanciful creature who had composed its pages, but soon we came upon it. Four miles and more we drove over the bottom of a lake now not even damp, making deep tracks in the white sand. Dry rivers were later to become commonplace, but we were children of Israel but this once. Suddenly beyond us in the distance, through a heat where no drop of water could live, we saw a sparkle and a shimmer of cool blue, and cottonwoods reflected in wet, wavering lines. Our dry lake had turned wet! Mountain peaks rose and floated on its surface,—and not till they melted and skipped about could I believe Toby’s assertion that we were gazing on a mirage. When she focused her camera upon the mirage I scoffed loudly. Tales of travelers in the desert had early rooted in my none too scientific mind the idea that a mirage is a subconscious desire visually projected, like the rootless vines which climb the air at the command of Hindu fakirs. When our finished print showed a definite, if faint, outline of non-existent hills, my little world was slightly less shaken than if Toby had produced a photograph of an astral wanderer from the spirit world. I do not like to look at it. It seems like black magic.

The desert, bleached dazzling white under an afternoon sun, seemed shorn of all the mysteries and apprehensions with which the previous night and Mrs. Flanagan had enveloped it. Now it lay stark and unromantic, colorless in a blare of heat. We were only a few miles from Tucson, when we mounted a hill, and poised a second, looking down on a horseshoe canyon. Our road, narrow and stony, threaded the edge of it,—a sharp down grade, a quick curve at the base, and a steady climb up. As we turned the brow of the hill and passed a clump of trees hiding the view of the bottom, ahead, directly across the road and blocking all passage stood a car. I put on the brakes sharply, and our car veered toward the edge and wavered. How stupid to leave a car directly across a dangerous road on a down grade! This was my first reaction. Then we saw two men, with the slouch that marks the Westerner, step from behind their car, and await our approach. Even while I concentrated on avoiding turning into the ditch, their very quiet manner as they awaited us arrested attention. It was not stupidity which made them choose to alight at that spot. It was an ideally clever place for a hold-up! Concealed itself, it commanded a view of the entire canyon, and would catch a car coming from either direction at lowered speed. These men were not waiting our approach for any casual purpose; something too guarded and watchful, too tensely alert, lay taut beneath their easy slouch. The elder, a bearded thick-set man, carelessly held his hand on his hip pocket, as they do in all Western novels. The taller and younger man stepped into the middle of the road, and raised a hand to stop us.

“Toby,” I said in a low voice, “this looks serious.”

“Bandits!” said Toby, her tone confirming my suspicions.

“Get out the monkey wrench, and point it as if it were a gun. I’ll try to crowd past the car and up the hill.”

“If we only had the ammonia pistol,” sighed Toby, murderously, getting the wrench and cocking it.

A gentle voice tinged with the sharp edge of command came from the younger man. “Better stop a minute, lady!”

We stopped, entirely contrary to our hastily made plans. Something in his level tone, and in a quick little gesture the man behind him made, changed our minds.

Without removing his hand from his hip the other man, who I quickly decided was the more desperate character of the two, strolled about our car with an appraising and well satisfied look. At that moment we felt we were indeed a long, long ways from home. I began to calculate the time it would take to walk to Tucson,—hampered, possibly, by a bullet wound. Then he pulled open his coat, and a gleam of metal caught the sunlight.

“I’m the sheriff of Pima County,” he said, briefly.

I did not believe him. I put my foot on the gas, and tightened my grip on the wheel, measuring the road ahead and calculating the slight chance of crowding past his car and up the steep hill ahead.

“Please show us your badge again, if you don’t mind.”

He gave us a full view of it this time. It looked genuine enough,—a silver star, not quite so large as the planet Jupiter, with rays darting therefrom, and Pima printed on it in bold letters,—a staggering affair, calculated to inspire respect for law and order.

“Were we speeding?” Toby faltered, remembering Houston.

“We’re making a little search,” he replied very crisply.

“Search,—for what?”

“Booze, for one thing,” said the lank young man. The other did not waste words.

It was evident from their manner they expected to find what they were hunting for. They walked about and punched our tires, darkly suspicious. We could not have felt more guilty if we had been concealing the entire annual output of Peoria. I heard Toby gasp, and knew she was wondering what Brattle St. would say.

“Where did you come from?” asked the sheriff.

“Benson,” we replied, mentioning the last town we had passed through.

“Ah!” Evidently a highly incriminating place to come from. They proceeded to examine our suit-cases thoroughly.

“I hate to search ladies,” said the sheriff, in brief apology, “but if ladies will smuggle booze into Pima County, it has to be done.”

At that moment his assistant caught sight of our knobby looking auto trunk.

“Ah!” Such a queer shaped trunk was beyond explanation. I handed over the keys in silence. They made a grim search, with no sign of unbending until they came to our funny little folding stove. Then the sheriff permitted a short smile to decorate his official expression, and I knew the worst was over. A moment later, the lank young man discovered our number-plate.

“Say! Are you from Massachusetts, lady?”