Free Air Part 11

He tried so to time his progress that he might always be from three to five miles behind Claire--distant enough to be unnoticed, near enough to help in case of need. For behind poetic expression and the use of forks was the fact that his purpose in life was to know Claire.

When he was caught, when Claire informed him that he "mustn't worry about her"; when, slowly, he understood that she wasn't being neighborly and interested in his making time, he wanted to escape, never to see her again.

For thirty miles his cheeks were fiery. He, most considerate of roadmen, crowded a woman in a flivver, pa.s.sed a laboring car on an upgrade with such a burst that the uneasy driver b.u.mped off into a ditch. He hadn't really seen them. Only mechanically had he got past them. He was muttering:

"She thought I was trying to b.u.t.t in! Stung again! Like a small boy in love with teacher. And I thought I was so wise! Cussed out Mac--blamed Mac--no, d.a.m.n all the fine words--cussed out Mac for being the village rumhound. Boozing is twice as sensible as me. See a girl, nice dress--start for Seattle! Two thousand miles away! Of course she bawled me out. She was dead right. b.o.o.b! Yahoo! Goat!"

He caught up Vere de Vere, rubbed her fur against his cheek while he mourned, "Oh, puss, you got to be nice to me. I thought I'd do big things. And then the alarm clock went off. I'm back in Schoenstrom. For keeps, I guess. I didn't know I had feelings that could get hurt like this. Thought I had a rhinoceros hide. But---- Oh, it isn't just feeling ashamed over being a fool. It's that---- Won't ever see her again. Not once. Way I saw her through the window, at that hotel, in that blue silky dress--that funny long line of b.u.t.tons, and her throat. Never have dinner--lunch--with her by the road----"

In the reaction of anger he demanded of Vere de Vere, "What the deuce do I care? If she's chump enough to chase away a crack garage man that's gone batty and wants to work for nothing, let her go on and hit some crook garage and get stuck for an entire overhauling. What do I care?

Had nice trip; that's all I wanted. Never did intend to go clear to Seattle, anyway. Go on to b.u.t.te, then back home. No more fussing about fool table-manners and books, and I certainly will cut out tagging behind her! No, sir! Nev-er again!"

It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next time!"

While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.

The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank gra.s.s about the slimy green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"

This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling "Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet, a poet rhymeless and inarticulate, who huddled behind the s.h.i.+eld of untrimmed currant bushes, and thought of the girl he would never see again.

He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.

He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the powdery beauty of _Youth's Encounter_; by the vision of laughter and dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not "roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.

In Vachel Lindsay's _Congo_, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of pa.s.sing cars. But Milt belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the gra.s.s that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight:

Swiftly the brazen car comes on.

It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.

I see great flashes where the far trail turns.

b.u.t.ting through the delicate mists of the morning, It comes like lightning, goes past roaring, It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing, On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills-- Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.

Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn, Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.

Milt did not reflect that if the poet had watched the Teal bug go by, he would not have recorded a scare-horn, a dare-horn, or anything mightier than a yip-horn. Milt saw himself a cross-continent racer, with the envious poet, left behind as a dot on the hill, celebrating his pa.s.sing.

"Lord!" he cried. "I didn't know there were books like these! Thought poetry was all like Longfellow and Byron. Old boys. Europe. And rhymed bellyachin' about hard luck. But these books--they're me." Very carefully: "No; they're I! And she gave 'em to me! I will see her again!

But she won't know it. Now be sensible, son! What do you expect?

Oh--nothing. I'll just go on, and sneak in one more glimpse of her to take back with me where I belong."

Half an hour after Claire had innocently pa.s.sed his ambush, he began to follow her. But not for days was he careless. If he saw her on the horizon he paused until she was out of sight. That he might not fail her in need, he bought a ridiculously expensive pair of field gla.s.ses, and watched her when she stopped by the road. Once, when both her right rear tire and the spare were punctured before she could make a town, Milt from afar saw her patch a tube, pump up the tire in the dust. He ached to go to her aid--though it cannot be said that hand-pumping was his favorite July afternoon sport.

Lest he encounter her in the streets, he always camped to the eastward of the town at which she spent the night. After dusk, when she was likely to end the day's drive in the first sizable place, he hid his bug in an alley and, like a spy after the papers, sneaked into each garage to see if her car was there.

He would stroll in, look about vacuously, and pipe to the suspicious night attendant, "Seen a traveling man named Smith?" Usually the garage man snarled, "No, I ain't seen n.o.body named Smith. An'thing else I can do for you?" But once he was so unlucky as to find the long-missing Mr.

Smith!

Mr. Smith was surprised and insistent. Milt had to do some quick lying.

During that interview the cement floor felt very hard under his fidgeting feet, and he thought he heard the garage man in the office telephoning, "Don't think he knows Smith at all. I got a hunch he's that auto thief that was through here last summer."

When Claire did not stop in the first town she reached after twilight, but drove on by dark, he had to do some perilous galloping to catch up.

The lights of a Teal are excellent for adornment, but they have no relation to illumination. They are dependent upon a magneto which is dependent only upon faith.

Once, skittering along by dark, he realized that the halted car which he had just pa.s.sed was the Gomez. He thought he heard a shout behind him, but in a panic he kept going.

To the burring motor he groaned, "Now I probably never will see her again. Except that she thinks I'm such a pest that I da.s.sn't let her know I'm in the same state, I sure am one successful lover. As a Prince Charming I win the Vanderbilt Cup. I'm going ahead backwards so fast I'll probably drop off into the Atlantic over the next hill!"

CHAPTER IX

THE MAN WITH AGATE EYES

When her car had crossed the Missouri River on the swing-ferry between Bismarck and Mandan, Claire had pa.s.sed from Middle West to Far West. She came out on an upland of virgin prairie, so treeless and houseless, so divinely dipping, so rough of gra.s.s, that she could imagine buffaloes still roving. In a hollow a real prairie schooner was camped, and the wandering homestead-seekers were cooking dinner beside it. From a quilt on the hay in the wagon a baby peeped, and Claire's heart leaped.

Beyond was her first b.u.t.te, its sharp-cut sides glittering yellow, and she fancied that on it the Sioux scout still sat sentinel, erect on his pony, the feather bonnet down his back.

Now she seemed to breathe deeper, see farther. Again she came from unbroken prairie into wheat country and large towns.

Her impression of the new land was not merely of sun-glaring breadth.

Sometimes, on a cloudy day, the wash of wheatlands was as brown and lowering and mysterious as an English moor in the mist. It dwarfed the far-off houses by its giant enchantment; its brooding reaches changed her att.i.tude of brisk, gas-driven efficiency into a melancholy that was full of hints of old dark beauty.

Even when the sun came out, and the land was brazenly optimistic, she saw more than just prosperity. In a new home, house and barn and windmill square-cornered and prosaic, plumped down in a field with wheat coming up to the unporticoed door, a habitation unshadowed, unsheltered, unsoftened, she found a frank cleanness, as though the inhabitants looked squarely out at life, unafraid. She felt that the keen winds ought to blow away from such a prairie-fronting post of civilization all mildew and cowardice, all the mummy dust of ancient fears.

These were not peasants, these farmers. Nor, she learned, were they the "hicks" of humor. She could never again encounter without fiery resentment the Broadway peddler's faith that farmers invariably say "Waal, by heck." For she had spent an hour talking to one Dakota farmer, genial-eyed, quiet of speech. He had explained the relation of alfalfa to soil-chemistry; had spoken of his daughter, who taught economics in a state university; and asked Mr. Boltwood how turbines were hitched up on liners.

In fact, Claire learned that there may be an almost tolerable state of existence without gardenias or the news about the latest Parisian imagists.

She dropped suddenly from the vast, smooth-swelling miles of wheatland into the tortured marvels of the Bad Lands, and the road twisted in the shadow of flying b.u.t.tresses and the terraced tombs of maharajas. While she tried to pick her way through a herd of wild, arroyo-bred cattle, she forgot her maneuvering as she was startled by the stabbing scarlet of a column of rock marking the place where for months deep beds of lignite had burned.

Claire had often given lifts to tramping harvesters and even hoboes along the road; had enjoyed the sight of their duffle-bags stuck up between the sleek fenders and the hood, and their talk about people and crops along the road, as they hung on the running-board. In the country of long hillslopes and sentinel b.u.t.tes between the Dakota Bad Lands and Miles City she stopped to shout to a man whose plodding heavy back looked f.a.gged, "Want a ride?"

"Sure! You bet!"

Usually her guests stepped on the right-hand running-board, beside Mr.

Boltwood, and this man was far over on the right side of the road. But, while she waited, he sauntered in front of the car, round to her side, mounted beside her. Before the car had started, she was sorry to have invited him. He looked her over grinningly, almost contemptuously. His unabashed eyes were as bright and hard as agates. Below them, his nose was twisted a little, his mouth bent insolently up at one corner, and his square long chin bristled.

Usually, too, her pa.s.sengers waited for her to start the conversation, and talked at Mr. Boltwood rather than directly to her. But the bristly man spat at her as the car started, "Going far?"

"Ye-es, some distance."

"Expensive car?"

"Why----"

"'Fraid of getting held up?"

"I hadn't thought about it."