SAGEBRUSH TOURISTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY
She had rested for two days in Miles City; had seen the horse-market,
with horse-wranglers in chaps; had taken dinner with army people at Fort
Keogh, once the bulwark against the Sioux, now nodding over the dry
grass on its parade ground.
By the Yellowstone River, past the Crow reservation, Claire had driven
on through the Real West, along the Great Highway. The Red Trail and the
Yellowstone Trail had joined now and she was one of the new Canterbury
Pilgrims. Even Mr. Boltwood caught the trick of looking for licenses,
and cried, "There's a Connecticut car!"
To the Easterner, a drive from New York to Cape Cod, over asphalt, is
viewed as heroic, but here were cars that had casually started on
thousand-mile vacations. She kept pace not only with large cars touring
from St. Louis or Detroit to Glacier Park and Yellowstone, but also she
found herself companionable with families of workmen, headed for a new
town and a new job, and driving because a flivver, bought second-hand
and soon to be sold again, was cheaper than trains.
"Sagebrush Tourists" these camping adventurers were called. Claire
became used to small cars, with curtain-lights broken, bearing
wash-boilers or refrigerators on the back, pasteboard suitcases lashed
by rope to the running-board, frying pans and canvas water bottles
dangling from top-rods. And once baby's personal laundry was seen
flapping on a line across a tonneau!
In each car was what looked like the crowd at a large
farm-auction--grandfather, father, mother, a couple of sons and two or
three daughters, at least one baby in the arms of each grown-up, all
jammed into two seats already filled with trunks and baby-carriages. And
they were happy--incredibly happier than the smart people being conveyed
in a bored way behind chauffeurs.
The Sagebrush Tourists made camp; covered the hood with a quilt from
which the cotton was oozing; brought out the wash-boiler, did a washing,
had dinner, sang about the fire; granther and the youngest baby
gamboling together, while the limousinvalids, insulated from life by
plate glass, preserved by their steady forty an hour from the commonness
of seeing anything along the road, looked out at the campers for a
second, sniffed, rolled on, wearily wondering whether they would find a
good hotel that night--and why the deuce they hadn't come by train.
If Claire Boltwood had been protected by Jeff Saxton or by a chauffeur,
she, too, would probably have marveled at cars gray with dust, the
unshaved men in fleece-lined duck coats, and the women wind-burnt
beneath the boudoir caps they wore as motoring bonnets. But Claire knew
now that filling grease-cups does not tend to delicacy of hands; that
when you wash with a cake of petrified pink soap and half a pitcher of
cold hard water, you never quite get the stain off--you merely get
through the dust stratum to the Laurentian grease formation, and mutter,
"a nice clean grease doesn't hurt food," and go sleepily down to dinner.
She saw a dozen camping devices unknown to the East: trailers, which by
day bobbed along behind the car like coffins on two wheels, but at night
opened into tents with beds, an ice-box, a table; tents covering a bed
whose head rested on the running-board; beds made-up in the car, with
the cushions as mattresses.
The Great Transcontinental Highway was colored not by motors alone. It
is true that the Old West of the stories is almost gone; that Billings,
Miles City, Bismarck, are more given to Doric banks than to gambling
hells. But still are there hints of frontier days. Still trudge the
prairie schooners; cowpunchers in chaps still stand at the doors of log
cabins--when they are tired of playing the automatic piano; and blanket
Indians, Blackfeet and Crows, stare at five-story buildings--when they
are not driving modern reapers on their farms.
They all waved to Claire. Telephone linemen, lolling with pipes and
climber-strapped legs in big trucks, sang out to her; traction engine
crews shouted; and these she found to be her own people. Only once did
she lose contentment--when, on the observation platform of a train bound
for Seattle, she saw a Britisher in flannels and a monocle, headed
perhaps for the Orient. As the train slipped silkenly away, the Gomez
seemed slow and clumsy, and the strain of driving intolerable. And that
Britisher must be charming---- Then a lonely, tight-haired woman in the
doorway of a tar-paper shack waved to her, and in that wistful gesture
Claire found friendship.
And sometimes in the "desert" of yet unbroken land she paused by the
Great Highway and forgot the passion to keep going----
She sat on a rock, by a river so muddy that it was like yellow milk. The
only trees were a bunch of cottonwoods untidily scattering shreds of
cotton, and the only other vegetation left in the dead world was
dusty green sagebrush with lumps of gray yet pregnant earth between,
or a few exquisite green and white flashes of the herb called
Snow-on-the-Mountain. The inhabitants were jackrabbits, or American
magpies in sharp black and white livery, forever trying to balance their
huge tails against the wind, and yelling in low-magpie their opinion of
tourists.
She did not desire gardens, then, nor the pettiness of plump terraced
hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to
it by her own plodding. Her soul--if she hadn't had one, it would
immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, the moment she
sat there--sailed with the hawks in the high thin air, and when it came
down it sang hallelujahs, because the sagebrush fragrance was more
healing than piney woods, because the sharp-bitten edges of the buttes
were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise, and because a real person,
one Milt Daggett, though she would never see him again, had found her
worthy of worship.
She did not often think of Milt; she did not know whether he was ahead
of her, or had again dropped behind. When she did recall him, it was
with respect quite different from the titillation that dancing men had
sometimes aroused, or the impression of manicured agreeableness and
efficiency which Jeff Saxton carried about.
She always supplicated the mythical Milt in moments of tight driving.
Driving, just the actual getting on, was her purpose in life, and the
routine of driving was her order of the day: Morning freshness, rolling
up as many miles as possible before lunch, that she might loaf
afterward. The invariable two P.M. discovery that her eyes ached, and
the donning of huge amber glasses, which gave to her lithe smartness a
counterfeit scholarliness. Toward night, the quarter-hour of level
sun-glare which prevented her seeing the road. Dusk, and the discovery
of how much light there was after all, once she remembered to take off
her glasses. The worst quarter-hour when, though the roads were an
amethyst rich to the artist, they were also a murkiness exasperating to
the driver, yet still too light to be thrown into relief by the lamps.
The mystic moment when night clicked tight, and the lamps made a fan of
gold, and Claire and her father settled down to plodding content--and no
longer had to take the trouble of admiring the scenery!
The morning out of Billings, she wondered why a low cloud so
persistently held its shape, and realized that it was a far-off
mountain, her first sight of the Rockies. Then she cried out, and wished
for Milt to share her exultation. Rather earnestly she said to Mr.
Boltwood:
"The mountains must be so wonderful to Mr. Daggett, after spending his
life in a cornfield. Poor Milt! I hope----"
"I don't think you need to worry about that young man. I fancy he's
quite able to run about by himself, as jolly as a sand-dog. And---- Of
course I'm extremely grateful to him for his daily rescue of us from the
jaws of death, but he was right; if he had stayed with us, it would have
been inconvenient to keep considering him. He isn't accustomed to the
comedy of manners----"
"He ought to be. He'd enjoy it so. He's the real American. He has
imagination and adaptability. It's a shame: all the _petits fours_ and
Bach recitals wasted on Jeff Saxton, when a Milt Dag----"
"Yes, yes, quite so!"
"No, honest! The dear honey-lamb, so ingenious, and really, rather
good-looking. But so lonely and gregarious--like a little woolly dog
that begs you to come and play; and I slapped him when he patted his
paws and gamboled---- It was horrible. I'll never forgive myself. Making
him drive on ahead in that nasty, patronizing way---- I feel as if we'd
spoiled his holiday. I wonder if he had intended to make the Yellowstone
Park trip? He didn't----"
"Yes, yes. Let's forget the young man. Look! How very curious!"
They were crossing a high bridge over a railroad track along which a
circus train was bending. Mr. Boltwood offered judicious remarks upon
the migratory habits of circuses, and the vision of the Galahad of the
Teal bug was thoroughly befogged by parental observations, till Claire
returned from youthful romance to being a sensible Boltwood, and decided
that after all, Milt was not a lord of the sky-painted mountains.
Before they bent south, at Livingston, Claire had her first mountain
driving, and once she had to ford a stream, putting the car at it,
watching the water curve up in a lovely silver veil. She felt that she
was conquering the hills as she had the prairies.
She pulled up on a plateau to look at her battery. She noted the edge of
a brake-band peeping beyond the drum, in a ragged line of fabric and
copper wire. Then she knew that she didn't know enough to conquer. "Do
you suppose it's dangerous?" she asked her father, who said a lot of
comforting things that didn't mean anything.
She thought of Milt. She stopped a passing car. The driver "guessed"
that the brake-band was all gone, and that it would be dangerous to
continue with it along mountain roads. Claire dustily tramped two miles
to a ranch house, and telephoned to the nearest garage, in a town called
Saddle Back.
Whenever a motorist has delirium he mutters those lamentable words,
"Telephoned to the nearest garage."
She had to wait a tedious hour before she saw a flivver rattling up with
the garage man, who wasn't a man at all, but a fourteen-year-old boy. He
snorted, "Rats, you didn't need to send for me. Could have made it
perfectly safe. Come on."
Never has the greatest boy pianist received such awe as Claire gave to
this contemptuous young god, with grease on his peachy cheeks. She did
come on. But she rather hoped that she was in great danger. It was
humiliating to telephone to a garage for nothing. When she came into the
gas-smelling garage in Saddle Back she said appealingly to the man in
charge, a serious, lip-puffing person of forty-five, "Was it safe to
come in with the brake-band like that?"
"No. Pretty risky. Wa'n't it, Mike?"
The Mike to whom he turned for authority was the same fourteen-year-old
boy. He snapped, "Heh? That? Naw! Put in new band. Get busy. Bring me
the jack. Hustle up, uncle."
While the older man stood about and vainly tried to impress people who
came in and asked questions which invariably had to be referred to his
repair boy, the precocious expert stripped the wheel down to something
that looked to Claire distressingly like an empty milk-pan. Then the boy
didn't seem to know exactly what to do. He scratched his ear a good
deal, and thought deeply. The older man could only scratch.
So for two hours Claire and her father experienced that most distressing
of motor experiences--waiting, while the afternoon that would have been
so good for driving went by them. Every fifteen minutes they came in
from sitting on a dry-goods box in front of the garage, and never did
the repair appear to be any farther along. The boy seemed to be giving
all his time to getting the wrong wrench, and scolding the older man for
having hidden the right one.
When she had left Brooklyn Heights, Claire had not expected to have such
authoritative knowledge of the Kalifornia Kandy Kitchen, Saddle Back,
Montana, across from Tubbs' Garage, that she could tell whether they
were selling more Atharva Cigarettes or Polutropons. She prowled about
the garage till she knew every pool of dripped water in the tin pail of
soft soap in the iron sink.
She was worried by an overheard remark of the boy wonder, "Gosh, we
haven't any more of that decent brake lining. Have to use this piece of
mush." But when the car was actually done, nothing like a dubious brake
could have kept her from the glory of starting. The first miles seemed
miracles of ease and speed.
She came through the mountains into Livingston.
Kicking his heels on a fence near town, and fondling a gray cat, sat
Milt Daggett, and he yelped at her with earnestness and much noise.