Free Air Part 3

Claire tried to give him a smile, but the best she could do was to lend him one. She could not a.s.sociate interesting food with Milt and his mud-s...o...b..red, tin-covered, dun-painted Teal bug. He seemed satisfied with her dubious grimace. By his suggestion they drove ahead to a spot where the cars could be parked on firm gra.s.s beneath oaks. On the way, Mr. Boltwood lifted his voice in dismay. His touch of nervous prostration had not made him queer or violent; he retained a touching faith in good food.

"We might find some good little hotel and have some chops and just some mushrooms and peas," insisted the man from Brooklyn Heights.

"Oh, I don't suppose the country hotels are really so awfully good," she speculated. "And look--that nice funny boy. We couldn't hurt his feelings. He's having so much fun out of being a Good Samaritan."

From the mysterious rounded back of his car Milt Daggett drew a tiny stove, to be heated by a can of solidified alcohol, a frying pan that was rather large for dolls but rather small for square-fingered hands, a jar of bacon, eggs in a bag, a coffee pot, a can of condensed milk, and a litter of unsorted tin plates and china cups. While, by his request, Claire scoured the plates and cups, he made bacon and eggs and coffee, the little stove in the bottom of his car sheltered by the cook's bending over it. The smell of food made Claire forgiving toward the fact that she was wet through; that the rain continued to drizzle down her neck.

He lifted his hand and demanded, "Take your shoes off!"

"Uh?"

He gulped. He stammered, "I mean--I mean your shoes are soaked through.

If you'll sit in the car, I'll put your shoes up by the engine. It's pretty well heated from racing it in the mud. You can get your stockings dry under the cowl."

She was amused by the elaborateness with which he didn't glance at her while she took off her low shoes and slipped her quite too thin black stockings under the protecting tin cowl. She reflected, "He has such a nice, awkward gentleness. But such bad taste! They're really quite good ankles. Apparently ankles are not done, in Teal bug circles. His sisters don't even have limbs. But do fairies have sisters? He is a fairy. When I'm out of the mud he'll turn his raincoat into a pair of lordly white wings, and vanish. But what will become of the cat?"

Thus her tired brain, like a squirrel in a revolving cage, while she sat primly and sc.r.a.ped at a clot of rust on a tin plate and watched him put on the bacon and eggs. Wondering if cats were used for this purpose in the Daggett family, she put soaked, unhappy Vere de Vere on her feet, to her own great comfort and the cat's delight. It was an open car, and the rain still rained, and a strange young man was a foot from her tending the not very crackly fire, but rarely had Claire felt so domestic.

Milt was apparently struggling to say something. After several bobs of his head he ventured, "You're so wet! I'd like for you to take my raincoat."

"No! Really! I'm already soaked through. You keep dry."

He was unhappy about it. He plucked at a b.u.t.ton of the coat. She turned him from the subject. "I hope Lady Vere de Vere is getting warm, too."

"Seems to be. She's kind of demanding. She wanted a little car of her own, but I didn't think she could keep up with me, not on a long hike."

"A little car? With her paws on the tiny wheel? Oh--sweet! Are you going far, Mr. Daggett?"

"Yes, quite a ways. To Seattle, Washington."

"Oh, really? Extraordinary. We're going there, too."

"Honest? You driving all the way? Oh, no, of course your father----"

"No, he doesn't drive. By the way, I hope he isn't too miserable back there."

"I'll be darned. Both of us going to Seattle. That's what they call a coincidence, isn't it! Hope I'll see you on the road, some time. But I don't suppose I will. Once you're out of the mud, your Gomez will simply lose my Teal."

"Not necessarily. You're the better driver. And I shall take it easy.

Are you going to stay long in Seattle?" It was not merely a polite dinner-payment question. She wondered; she could not place this fresh-cheeked, unworldly young man so far from his home.

"Why, I kind of hope---- Government railroad, Alaska. I'm going to try to get in on that, somehow. I've never been out of Minnesota in my life, but there's couple mountains and oceans and things I thought I'd like to see, so I just put my suitcase and Vere de Vere in the machine, and started out. I burn distillate instead of gas, so it doesn't cost much.

If I ever happen to have five whole dollars, why, I might go on to j.a.pan!"

"That would be jolly."

"Though I s'pose I'd have to eat--what is it?--pickled fish? There's a woman from near my town went to the Orient as a missionary. From what she says, I guess all you need in j.a.pan to make a house is a bottle of mucilage and a couple of old newspapers and some two-by-fours. And you can have the house on a purple mountain, with cherry trees down below, and----" He put his clenched hand to his lips. His head was bowed. "And the ocean! Lord! The ocean! And we'll see it at Seattle. Bay, anyway.

And steamers there--just come from India! Huh! Getting pretty darn poetic here! Eggs are done."

The young man did not again wander into visions. He was all briskness as he served her bacon and eggs, took a plate of them to Mr. Boltwood in the Gomez, gouged into his own. Having herself scoured the tin plates, Claire was not repulsed by their naked tinniness; and the coffee in the broken-handled china cup was tolerable. Milt drank from the top of a vacuum bottle. He was silent. Immediately after the lunch he stowed the things away. Claire expected a drawn-out, tact-demanding farewell, but he climbed into his bug, said "Good-by, Miss Boltwood. Good luck!" and was gone.

The rainy road was bleakly empty without him.

It did not seem possible that Claire's body could be nagged into going on any longer. Her muscles were relaxed, her nerves frayed. But the moment the Gomez started, she discovered that magic change which every long-distance motorist knows. Instantly she was alert, seemingly able to drive forever. The pilot's instinct ruled her; gave her tireless eyes and st.u.r.dy hands. Surely she had never been weary; never would be, so long as it was hers to keep the car going.

She had driven perhaps six miles when she reached a hamlet called St.

Klopstock. On the bedraggled mud-and-shanty main street a man was loading crushed rock into a truck. By him was a large person in a prosperous raincoat, who stepped out, held up his hand. Claire stopped.

"You the young lady that got stuck in that hole by Adolph Zolzac's?"

"Yes. And Mr. Zolzac wasn't very nice about it."

"He's going to be just elegant about it, now, and there ain't going to be any more hole. I think Adolph has been keeping it muddy--throwing in soft dirt--and he made a good and plenty lot out of pulling out tourists. Bill and I are going down right now and fill it up with stone.

Milt Daggett come through here--he's got a nerve, that fellow, but I did have to laugh--he says to me, 'Barney----' This was just now. He hasn't more than just drove out of town. He said to me, 'Barney,' he says, 'you're the richest man in this township, and the banker, and you got a big car y'self, and you think you're one whale of a political boss,' he says, 'and yet you let that Zolzac maintain a private ocean, against the peace and d.a.m.n horrible inconvenience of the Commonwealth of Minnesota----' He's got a great line of talk, that fellow. He told me how you got stuck--made me so ashamed--I been to New York myself--and right away I got Bill, and we're going down and hold a donation and surprise party on Adolph and fill that hole."

"But won't Adolph dig it out again?"

The banker was puffy, but his eyes were of stone. From the truck he took a shotgun. He drawled, "In that case, the surprise party will include an elegant wake."

"But how did---- Who is this extraordinary Milt Daggett?"

"Him? Oh, n.o.body 'specially. He's just a fellow down here at Schoenstrom. But we all know him. Goes to all the dances, thirty miles around. Thing about him is: if he sees something wrong, he picks out some poor fellow like me, and says what he thinks."

Claire drove on. She was aware that she was looking for Milt's bug. It was not in sight.

"Father," she exclaimed, "do you realize that this lad didn't tell us he was going to have the hole filled? Just did it. He frightens me. I'm afraid that when we reach Gopher Prairie for the night, we'll find he has engaged for us the suite that Prince Collars and Cuffs once slept in."

"Hhhhmm," yawned her father.

"Curious young man. He said, 'Pleased to meet you.'"

"Huuuuhhm! Fresh air makes me so sleepy."

"And---- Fooled you! Got through that mudhole, anyway! And he said---- Look! Fields stretch out so here, and not a tree except the willow-groves round those farmhouses. And he said 'Gee' so many times, and 'dinner' for the noon meal. And his nails---- No, I suppose he really is just a farm youngster."

Mr. Boltwood did not answer. His machine-finish smile indicated an enormous lack of interest in young men in Teal bugs.

CHAPTER IV

A ROOM WITHOUT

Gopher Prairie has all of five thousand people. Its commercial club a.s.serts that it has at least a thousand more population and an infinitely better band than the ridiculously envious neighboring town of Joralemon. But there were few signs that a suite had been engaged for the Boltwoods, or that Prince Collars and Cuffs had on his royal tour of America spent much time in Gopher Prairie. Claire reached it somewhat before seven. She gaped at it in a hazy way. Though this was her first prairie town for a considerable stay, she could not pump up interest.

The state of mind of the touring motorist entering a strange place at night is as peculiar and definite as that of a prospector. It is compounded of grat.i.tude at having got safely in; of perception of a new town, yet with all eagerness about new things dulled by weariness; of hope that there is going to be a good hotel, but small expectation--and absolutely no probability--that there really will be one.