"Road darn muddy."

"I should worry. Yea, bo', I'm feelin' good!"

At eleven minutes past twelve a Gomez-Dep roadster appeared down the road, stopped at the garage. To Milt it was as exciting as the appearance of a comet to a watching astronomer.

"What kind of a car do you call that, Milt?" asked a loafer.

"Gomez-Deperdussin."

"Never heard of it. Looks too heavy."

This was sacrilege. Milt stormed, "Why, you poor floof, it's one of the best cars in the world. Imported from France. That looks like a special-made American body, though. Trouble with you fellows is, you're always scared of anything that's new. Too--heavy! Huh! Always wanted to see a Gomez--never have, except in pictures. And I believe that's a New York license. Let me at it!"

He forgot noon-hunger, and clumped through the rain to the garage. He saw a girl step from the car. He stopped, in the doorway of the Old Home, in uneasy shyness. He told himself he didn't "know just what it is about her--she isn't so darn unusually pretty and yet--gee---- Certainly isn't a girl to get fresh with. Let Ben take care of her. Like to talk to her, and yet I'd be afraid if I opened my mouth, I'd put my foot in it."

He was for the first time seeing a smart woman. This dark, slender, fine-nerved girl, in her plain, rough, closely-belted, gray suit, her small black Glengarry c.o.c.ked on one side of her smooth hair, her little kid gloves, her veil, was as delicately adjusted as an aeroplane engine.

Milt wanted to trumpet her exquisiteness to the world, so he growled to a man standing beside him, "Swell car. Nice-lookin' girl, kind of."

"Kind of skinny, though. I like 'em with some meat on 'em," yawned the man.

No, Milt did not strike him to earth. He insisted feebly, "Nice clothes she's got, though."

"Oh, not so muchamuch. I seen a woman come through here yesterday that was swell, though--had on a purple dress and white shoes and a hat big 's a bushel."

"Well, I don't know, I kind of like those simple things," apologized Milt.

He crept toward the garage. The girl was inside. He inspected the slope-topped, patent-leather motoring trunk on the rack at the rear of the Gomez-Dep. He noticed a middle-aged man waiting in the car. "Must be her father. Probably--maybe she isn't married then." He could not get himself to shout at the man, as he usually did. He entered the garage office; from the inner door he peeped at the girl, who was talking to his a.s.sistant about changing an inner tube.

That Ben Sittka whom an hour ago he had cajoled as a promising child he now admired for the sniffing calmness with which he was demanding, "Want a red or gray tube?"

"Really, I don't know. Which is the better?" The girl's voice was curiously clear.

Milt pa.s.sed Claire Boltwood as though he did not see her; stood at the rear of the garage kicking at the tires of a car, his back to her. Over and over he was grumbling, "If I just knew one girl like that---- Like a picture. Like--like a silver vase on a blue cloth!"

Ben Sittka did not talk to the girl while he inserted the tube in the spare casing. Only, in the triumphant moment when the parted ends of the steel rim snapped back together, he piped, "Going far?"

"Yes, rather. To Seattle."

Milt stared at the cobweb-grayed window. "Now I know what I was planning to do. I'm going to Seattle," he said.

The girl was gone at twenty-nine minutes after twelve. At twenty-nine and a half minutes after, Milt remarked to Ben Sittka, "I'm going to take a trip. Uh? Now don't ask questions. You take charge of the garage until you hear from me. Get somebody to help you. G'-by."

He drove his Teal bug out of the garage. At thirty-two minutes after twelve he was in his room, packing his wicker suitcase by the method of throwing things in and stamping on the case till it closed. In it he had absolutely all of his toilet refinements and wardrobe except the important portion already in use. They consisted, according to faithful detailed report, of four extra pairs of thick yellow and white cotton socks; two shirts, five collars, five handkerchiefs; a pair of surprisingly vain dancing pumps; high tan laced boots; three suits of cheap cotton underclothes; his Sunday suit, which was dead black in color, and unimaginative in cut; four ties; a f.a.gged toothbrush, a comb and hairbrush, a razor, a strop, shaving soap in a mug; a not very clean towel; and nothing else whatever.

To this he added his entire library and private picture gallery, consisting of Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur, his father's copy of Byron, a wireless manual, and the 1916 edition of Motor Construction and Repairing: the art collection, one colored Sunday supplement picture of a princess lunching in a Provence courtyard, and a half-tone of Colonel Paul Beck landing in an early military biplane. Under this last, in a pencil scrawl now blurred to grayness, Milt had once written, "This what Ill be aviator."

What he was to wear was a piercing trouble. Till eleven minutes past twelve that day he had not cared. People accepted his overalls at anything except a dance, and at the dances he was the only one who wore pumps. But in his discovery of Claire Boltwood he had perceived that dressing is an art. Before he had packed, he had unhappily pawed at the prized black suit. It had become stupid. "Undertaker!" he growled.

With a shrug which indicated that he had nothing else, he had exchanged his overalls for a tan flannel shirt, black bow tie, thick pigskin shoes, and the suit he had worn the evening before, his best suit of two years ago--baggy blue serge coat and trousers. He could not know it, but they were surprisingly graceful on his wiry, firm, white body.

In his pockets were a roll of bills and an unexpectedly good gold watch.

For warmth he had a winter ulster, an old-fashioned turtle-neck sweater, and a raincoat heavy as tarpaulin. He plunged into the raincoat, ran out, galloped to Rauskukle's store, bought the most vehement cap in the place--a plaid of cerise, orange, emerald green, ultramarine, and five other guaranteed fashionable colors. He stocked up with food for roadside camping.

In the humping tin-covered tail of the bug was a good deal of room, and this he filled with motor extras, a shotgun and sh.e.l.ls, a pair of skates, and all his camping kit as used on his annual duck-hunting trip to Man Trap Lake.

"I'm a darned fool to take everything I own but---- Might be gone a whole month," he reflected.

He had only one possession left--a check book, concealed from the interested eye of his too maternal landlady by sticking it under the stair carpet. This he retrieved. It showed a balance of two hundred dollars. There was ten dollars in the cash register in the office, for Ben Sittka. The garage would, with the mortgage deducted, be worth nearly two thousand. This was his fortune.

He bolted into the kitchen and all in one shout he informed his landlady, "Called out of town, li'l trip, b'lieve I don't owe you an'thing, here's six dollars, two weeks' notice, dunno just when I be back."

Before she could issue a questionnaire he was out in the bug. He ran through town. At his friend McGolwey; now loose-lipped and wabbly, sitting in the rain on a pile of ties behind the railroad station, he yelled, "So long, Mac. Take care yourself, old hoss. Off on li'l trip."

He stopped in front of the "prof's," tooted till the heads of the Joneses appeared at the window, waved and shouted, "G'-by, folks. Goin'

outa town."

Then, while freedom and the distant Pacific seemed to rush at him over the hood, he whirled out of town. It was two minutes to one--forty-seven minutes since Claire Boltwood had entered Schoenstrom.

He stopped only once. His friend Lady Vere de Vere was at the edge of town, on a scientific exploring trip in the matter of ethnology and field mice. She hailed him, "Mrwr? Me mrwr!"

"You don't say so!" Milt answered in surprise. "Well, if I promised to take you, I'll keep my word." He vaulted out, tucked Vere de Vere into the seat, protecting her from the rain with the tarpaulin winter radiator-cover.

His rut-skipping car overtook the mud-walloping Gomez-Dep in an hour, and pulled it out of the mud.

Before Milt slept that night, in his camp three miles from Gopher Prairie, he went through religious rites.

"Girl like her, she's darn particular about her looks. I'm a sloppy hound. Used to be snappier about my clothes when I was in high school.

Getting lazy--too much like Mac. Think of me sleeping in my clothes last night!"

"Mrwr!" rebuked the cat.

"You're dead right. Fierce is the word. Nev' will sleep in my duds again, puss. That is, when I have a reg'lar human bed. Course camping, different. But still---- Let's see all the funny things we can do to us."

He shaved--two complete shaves, from lather to towel. He brushed his hair. He sat down by a campfire sheltered between two rocks, and fought his nails, though they were discouragingly crammed with motor grease.

Throughout this interesting but quite painful ceremony Milt kept up a conversation between himself as the World's Champion Dude, and his cat as Vallay. But when there was nothing more to do, and the fire was low, and Vere de Vere asleep in the sleeve of the winter ulster, his b.u.mbling voice slackened; in something like agony he muttered:

"But oh, what's the use? I can't ever be anything but a dub! Cleaning my nails, to make a hit with a girl that's got hands like hers! It's a long trail to Seattle, but it's a darn sight longer one to being--being--well, sophisticated. Oh! And incidentally, what the deuce am I going to do in Seattle if I do get there?"

CHAPTER VI

THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS

Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew.

Rippling and blue, with long gra.s.s up to its edge, a spot of dancing light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire pa.s.sed. She had left the occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on the treeless Great Plains.