Free Air Part 24

"Then everything's all right. I'm sure we were all tired. We'll just forget it."

"Morning, Daggett," Mr. Boltwood put in. "Hope you lose that dreadful red-headed person."

"No, I can't, Mr. Boltwood. When Mr. Saxton turned on me, I swore I'd take Pinky clear through to Blewett Pa.s.s ... though not to Seattle, by golly!"

"Foolish oaths should be broken," Claire plat.i.tudinized.

"Claire--look---- You don't really care so terribly much about these little luxuries, food and fixin's and six-dollar-a-day-hotel junk, do you?"

"Yes," stoutly, "I do."

"But not compared with mountains and----"

"Oh, it's all very well to talk, and be so superior about these dear old grandeurs of Nature, and the heroism of pioneers, and I do like a glimpse of them. But the niceties of life do mean something and even if it is weak and dependent, I shall always simply adore them!"

"All these things are kind of softening." And he meant that she was still soft.

"At least they're not rude!" And she meant that he was rude.

"They're absolutely trivial. They shut off----"

"They shut off rain and snow and dirt, and I still fail to see the picturesqueness of dirt! Good-by!"

She had driven off, without looking back. She was heading for Seattle and the Pacific Ocean at forty miles an hour--and they had no engagement to meet either in Seattle or in the Pacific.

Before Milt went on he completed a task on which he had decided the night before while he had meditated on the tailored impertinence of Jeff Saxton's gray suit. The task was to give away the Best Suit, that stolid, very black covering which at Schoenstrom had seemed suitable either to a dance or to the Y. P. S. C. E. The recipient was Mr. Pinky Parrott, who gave in return a history of charity and high souls.

Milt did not listen. He was wondering, now that they had started, where they had started for. Certainly not for Seattle! Why not stop and see Pinky's gold-mine? Maybe he did have one. Even Pinky had to tell the truth sometimes. With a good popular gold-mine in his possession, Milt could buy quant.i.ties of clothes like Jeff Saxton's, and----

"And," he reflected, "I can learn as good manners as his in one hour, with a dancing lesson thrown in. If I didn't, I'd sue the professor!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE NIGHT OF ENDLESS PINES

On the edge of Kootenai Canyon, feeling more like an aviator than like an automobilist, Claire had driven, and now, nearing Idaho, she had entered a national forest. She was delayed for hours, while she tried to change a casing, after a blow-out when the spare tire was deflated. She wished for Milt. She would never see him again. She was sorry. He hadn't meant----

But hang it, she panted, if he admired her at all, he'd be here now and get on this per-fect-ly beast-ly casing, over which she had been laboring for a dozen years; and she was simply too ridiculously tired; and was there any respectful way of keeping Henry B. from beaming in that benevolent manner while she was killing herself; and look at those fingernails; and--oh, drrrrrrat that casing!

To make the next town, after this delay, she had to drive for hours by night through the hulking pines of the national forest. It was her first long night drive.

A few claims, with log cabins of recent settlers, once or twice the shack of a forest-ranger, a telephone in a box by the road or a rough R.

F. D. box nailed to a pine trunk, these indicated that civilization still existed, but they were only melancholy blurs. She was in a cold enchantment. All of her was dead save the ability to keep on driving, forever, with no hope of the tedium ending. She was bewildered. She pa.s.sed six times what seemed to be precisely the same forest clearing, always with the road on a tiny ridge to the left of the clearing, always with a darkness-stilled house at one end and always, in the pasture at the other end, a horse which neighed. She was in a panorama stage-scene; things moved steadily by her, there was a sound of the engine, and a sensation of steering, but she was forever in the same place, among the same pines, with the same scowling blackness between their bare clean trunks. Only the road ahead was clear: a one-way track, the foot-high earthy bank and the pine-roots beside it, two distinct ruts, and a roughening of strewn brown bark and pine-needles, which, in the beating light of the car's lamps, made the sandy road scabrous with little incessant shadows.

She had never known anything save this strained driving on. Jeff and Milt were old tales, and untrue. Was it ten hours before that she had cooked dinner beside the road? No matter. She wasn't hungry any longer.

She would never reach the next town--and she didn't care. It wasn't she, but a grim spirit which had entered her dead body, that kept steering, feeding gas, watching the road.

In the darkness outside the funnel of light from her lamps were shadows that leaped, and gray hands hastily jerked back out of sight behind tree trunks as she came up; things that followed her, and hidden men waiting for her to stop.

As drivers will, she tried to exorcise the creeping fear by singing. She made up what she called her driving-song. It was intended to echo the hoofs of a fat old horse on a hard road:

The old horse trots with a jog, jog, jog, And a jog, jog, jog; and a jog, jog, jog.

And the old road makes a little jog, jog, jog, To the west, jog, jog; and the north, jog, jog.

While the farmer drinks some cider from his jug, jug, jug, From his coy jug, jug; from his joy jug, jug.

Till he acc.u.mulates a little jag, jag, jag, And he jigs, jigs, jigs, with his jug, jug, jug----

The song was a comfort, at first--then a torment. She drove to it, and she steered to it, and when she tried to forget, it sang itself in her tired brain: "Jog, jog, jog--oh, _d.a.m.n_!"

Her father had had a chill. Miserable, weak as a small boy, he had curled up on the bottom of the car, his head on the seat, and gone to sleep. She was alone. The mile-posts went by slowly. The posts said there was a town ahead called Pellago, but it never came----

And when it did come she was too tired to care. In a thick dream she drove through midnight streets of the town. In stupid paralysis she kicked at the door of the galvanized-iron-covered garage. No answer. She gave it up. She drove down the street and into the yard of a hotel marked by a swing sign out over the plank sidewalk. She got out the traveling bags, awakened her father, led him up on the porch.

The Pellago Tavern was a transformed dwelling house. The pillars of the porch were aslant, and the rain-warped boards snapped beneath her feet.

She hesitatingly opened the door. The hallway was dark and musty. A sound like a moan filtered down the unlighted stairs.

There seemed to be light in the room on the right. Trying to a.s.sure herself that her father was a protection, she pushed open the door. She looked into an airless room, scattered with rubber boots, unsavory old corduroy caps, tattered magazines. By the stove nodded a wry-mouthed, squat old woman, and a tall, cheaply handsome man of forty. Tobacco juice stained the front of his stiff-bosomed, collarless shirt. His hands were white but huge.

The old woman started. "Well?"

"I want to get two rooms for the night, please."

The man smirked at her. The woman creaked, "Well, I don't know. Where d'

you come from, heh?"

"We're motoring through."

"Heh? Who's that man?"

"He's my father, madam."

"Needn't to be so hoity-toity about it, 'he's my father, madam!' F' that matter, that thing there is my husband!"

The man had been dusting his shabby coat, stroking his mustache, smiling with sickly gallantry. He burbled, "Shut up, Teenie. This lady is all right. Give her a room. Number 2 is empty, and I guess Number 7 has been made up since Bill left--if 'tain't, the sheets ain't been slept on but one night."

"Where d' you come----"

"Now don't go shooting off a lot of questions at the lady, Teenie. I'll show her the rooms."

The woman turned on her husband. He was perhaps twenty-five years younger; a quarter-century less soaked in hideousness. Her yellow, concave-sided teeth were bared at him, her mouth drew up on one side above the gums. "Pete, if I hear one word more out of you, out you go.

Lady! Huh! Where d' you come from, young woman?"

Claire was too weak to stagger away. She leaned against the door. Her father struggled to speak, but the woman hurled:

"Wherdjuhcomfromised!"