All right, Jim, I'll reluctantly shut up and focus my attention on the salmon-colored cloaks and green stockings for a while. I forgot that you don't take any deep, abiding interest in automobiles. All they mean to you is something to ride in, but to me they're as interesting as a new magazine. I've spent about four days in the sales-rooms since I've been here, and when I get home I'll be the center of breathless attention until I've pa.s.sed around all the information I've dug up. I could go back without any information about the new shows, or the city campaign, but if I were to come back without a bale of automobile gossip, I'd be fired for gross incompetency from the League of Amateur Advisers at Gayley's garage.

You thought I said I didn't own a machine? I did say it and I can prove it. But do you suppose that makes any difference in Homeburg? Here the other fellow's car is his own business. But in Homeburg an automobile is every one's business. It's like the weekly newspaper, or the new minister, or the latest wedding--it's common property. Since gasoline has been domesticated we're all enthusiasts, whether we are customers or not. The man who can't talk automobile is as lonely as the chap who can't play golf at a country club. About all there is left for him to do is to hunt up Postmaster Flint and talk politics. Flint has to talk all our politics; it's what he's paid for, but it's mighty hard on him because he just bought a new machine last spring himself.

No, you guessed wrong, Jim. Automobiles aren't a curiosity in Homeburg.

How many are there in New York? Say eighty thousand. One for every sixty people. Homeburg has twenty-five hundred people and one hundred machines, counting Sim Askinson's old one-lunger and Red Nolan's refined corn sh.e.l.ler, which he built out of the bone-yard back of Gayley's garage. That's one for every twenty-five people. Figure that out. It only gives each auto five members of the family and twenty citizens to haul around. We're about up to the limit. Of course another one hundred people could buy machines, I suppose; but that would only allow twelve and a half pa.s.sengers, admirers, guests, and advisers for each car. That isn't anywhere near enough. Why, it wouldn't be worth while owning a machine! As it is, we are all busy. I've ridden in twenty new machines this year and pa.s.sed my opinion on them. It has taken a good deal of my spare time. I've thought sometimes of buying one myself, but I don't believe it would be right. If I had a car myself, I would have to neglect all the others. It wouldn't do. Besides, I like to be peculiar.

Is every one in Homeburg a millionaire? Goodness, no! Our brag is that we have less people per automobile than any other town, but then that's the ordinary brag with an Illinois small town. We're not much ahead of the others. Automobiles don't stand for riches out our way. Blamed if I know what they do represent. Mechanical ingenuity, I guess. Country town people pick up automobiles as easily as poor people do twins. And they seem to support them about as inexpensively. If you were to take a trip around Homeburg at seven A.M. on a Sunday morning, you would find about eighty-seven automobile owners out in the back yard over, under, or wrapped around their machines.

In the city you can only tell a car owner these days by his silk socks; but in the country town the grimy hand is still the badge of the order.

The automobile owner does his own work, like his wife, and on Sunday morning, instead of hustling for the golf links, he inserts himself into his overalls and spends a couple of hours trying to persuade the carbureter to use more air and less gasoline. The interest our automobile owners take in the internals of their cars is intense. That is the only thing which mars the pleasure of the professional guest, such as myself. More than once I've sat in the sun twenty miles from home while some host of mine has taken his engine down clear to the bed plate, just because he had the time to do it and wanted to see how the bearings were standing up.

I've lived in Homeburg all my life, but I haven't yet solved the mystery of how some of our citizens own machines. It's a bigger mystery than yours because our automobile owners pay their bills, and the mortgage records don't tell us anything. There's Wilc.o.x, the telegraph operator.

He makes seventy-five dollars a month. He works nights to earn it, and he spends his days driving around the country in his runabout. He's thirty years old, and I think he invested in an auto instead of a wife.

You can get a good meal in our local restaurant for twenty-five cents, and when some painstaking plutocrat comes in and tries to spend a dollar there, he has to be removed by kindly hands in a state of fatal distension before the job is finished. A thousand dollars would buy stock, fixtures, and good will. But a thousand wouldn't buy the restaurant owner's automobile. He began with two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of rubbish and a monkey wrench four years ago, and has pottered and tinkered and traded and progressed until he now owns a last year's model, staggering under labor-saving devices.

Our oculist, who does business in a tiny corner in a shoe-store and never overcharged any one in his life, was our pioneer automobile owner.

He bought a homemade machine and a mule at the same time, and by judiciously combining the two he got a good deal of mileage out of both.

He would work all morning getting the automobile down-town and all afternoon getting the mule to haul it back. He has had three machines since then, and the one he owns now is only third-hand.

For years Mrs. Strawn washed clothes for the town from morning till night, two washings a day and all garments returned intact. Her boys used to call at our house for the wash with a wheelbarrow. They come in an automobile now. She bought it. It was a hopeless invalid at the time, but they nursed it back to health, and I hear that next spring they are going to trade it in for a new machine.... Why do I say machine? Because that's what an automobile is out our way. It's a machine, and we treat it as such. Most of our people couldn't take a lobster to pieces to save their lives, but you ought to see them go through the sh.e.l.l of an auto.

Too many Americans buy portable parlors with sixty-seven coats of varnish, and are then shocked and grieved to discover when too late that said parlors have gizzards just like any other automobile and that they should have been looked after.

I said there were one hundred automobiles in Homeburg. I was mistaken.

There are ninety-nine automobiles and one car. The Payleys own the car.

They bought it in New York, paid six thousand dollars for it, with a chauffeur thrown in to drive them home, and they have been under his thumb ever since. He was the only chauffeur who had ever been brought alive in captivity to Homeburg, and the whole town inspected him with the utmost care. He was the best stationary chauffeur I ever saw. He seemed to regard that car as a monument and was shocked at the idea of moving it around from place to place.

It was too high-priced a car to be touched by Sam Gayley, our local auto doc., and somehow the chauffeur never seemed to be able to keep it in running order long enough to get up to the Payley residence and take the family out. He ran around the country a good deal, however, tuning it up and trying it out, and as he was a sociable cuss, some of us always went with him. In fact, about every one rode in the Payley car that summer except the Payleys. Wert Payley used to stop me and ask if I could fix it up to take him along sometime when I went riding with his chauffeur, but I never would risk it. Besides, it would be imposing on the boy's generosity to lug a friend along when you went riding.

The most of our machines vary from the one thousand, five hundred dollar touring car to the five hundred dollar little fellows; and since they have come, life in Homeburg is twice as interesting. They are our dissipation, our excitement, our amus.e.m.e.nt, and the focus of our town pride. The Checker Club disbanded last winter because the members got to quarreling over self-starters, and I understand that in the Women's Missionary Societies and the afternoon clubs the comparative riding qualities of the various tonneaus about the city have about driven out teething and styles as a subject of debate. For a while during the Wilson campaign, it looked as if politics was going to get a foothold in the town, but some enthusiast organized a flying squadron of automobiles to propagate Democratic gospel, and then it was all off. Everybody rushed into the squadron, and the trips around the district became reliability runs, with a lone orator addressing the freeborn citizens upon the tariff at each stop, and said freeborn citizens discussing magnetos, springs, and tires with great earnestness and vehemence during the speech.

Business always suspends for half a day whenever a new automobile comes to town. There may be a dozen of the same make already, but that doesn't make any difference. We are experts, trained to notice the finer shades of perfection, and until we have seen each new machine put up the clay hill four miles south of town and have ridden in it over the Q. B. & C.

crossing and the other places which show up bad springs, we can't fix our minds on our work. Time was when a new baby could come into Homeburg and hold the attention of the town for a week. Now a baby is lucky if its birth notice isn't crowded out of the _Democrat_ to make room for the list of new machines.

As for those of us who haven't automobiles, life is pleasant and without responsibilities. We ride in every new automobile, and, what is more, we go over it as carefully as a farmer does a new horse. We open its hood and pry into its internal economy. We crank it to test its compression--half the Homeburg men who have achieved broken wrists by the crank route haven't autos at all. We denounce the owner's judgment on oils and take his machine violently away from him in order to prove that it will pull better uphill with the spark r.e.t.a.r.ded. At night, during the summer, we hurry through supper and then go out on the front porch to wait for a chance to act as ballast.

No automobile owner in the dirt roads belt will go out without a full tonneau if he can help it--makes riding easier--and this means permanent employment during the evenings for about three hundred friends all summer long. In fact the demand for ballast is often greater than the supply. As a result, we have become hideously spoiled. I have pa.s.sed up as many as six automobiles in an evening on various captious pretexts, waiting all the time for Sim Bone's car, whose tonneau is long and exactly fits my legs. Once or twice Sim has failed to come around after I have waved the rest of the procession by, and we have had to stay at home. I have spoken to him severely about this, and he is more careful now.

Because of our great interest in automobiles, vicarious or otherwise, there is no cla.s.s-hatred in Homeburg. If a man were to stop by the roadside and begin to denounce the automobile as an oppressor of the pedestrian, he would in all probability be kidnaped by some acquaintance before he was half through and carried forty miles away for company's sake. About the only Homeburg resident who doesn't ride is old Auntie Morley, who broke her leg in a bobsled sixty years ago and has had a holy horror of speed ever since.

In fact the only cla.s.ses we have are the privileged cla.s.s who merely ride in automobiles and the oppressed cla.s.s who ride and have to pay for them, too. Lately the latter cla.s.s has begun to feel itself abused and has been grumbling a little, but we overlook it. No appeal to prejudice and jealousy can move us. Of course, I don't think that an automobile owner should be expected to leave his wife at home in order to accommodate his neighbors, and there may be some just complaint when an owner is called up late at night and asked to haul friends home from a party to which he hasn't been invited. But on the whole the automobile owners are very well treated. Suppose we spectators should band together and refuse to ride in the things or talk about them! The market would be glutted with second-hand cars in a month.

We have no trouble with the speed limit in Homeburg either. This may be due partly to our good sense, but it is mostly due to our peculiar crossings. Homeburg is paved with rich black dirt, and in order to keep the populace out of the bosom of the soil in the muddy seasons, the brick crossings are built high and solid, forming a series of impregnable "thank-ye-marms" all over the town. One of our great diversions during the tourist season is to watch the reckless strangers from some other State dash madly into town at forty miles an hour and hit the crossing at the head of Main Street. There is a crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top.

There is another crash and more screams at the other side of the street, and before the driver has diagnosed the case, he has. .h.i.t the Exchange Street crossing, which sticks out like the Reef of Norman's Woe. When he has landed on the other side of this crossing, he slows down and goes meekly out of town at ten miles an hour, while we saunter forth and pick up small objects of value such as wrenches, luncheon baskets, hairpins, hats, and pa.s.sengers.

Last summer we picked up an oldish man who had been thrown out of an unusually jambangsome touring car. He had been traveling in the tonneau alone, and even before he met our town he had not been enjoying himself.

The driver and his accomplice had not noticed their loss, and when we had brushed off and restored the old gentleman, he said "Thank G.o.d!" and went firmly over to the depot, where he took the next train for home, leaving no word behind in case his friends should return--which they did that afternoon and searched mournfully at a snail's pace for over twenty miles on both sides of our town.

Since the automobile has begun to rage in our midst, the garage is the center of our city life. The machine owners stop each day for lubricating oil and news and conversation; the non-owners stroll over to inspect the visiting cars and give advice when necessary; and the loafers have abandoned the implement store, Emerson's restaurant, and the back of McMuggins' drug store in favor of the garage, because they find about seven times as much there to talk about. The city garage can't compare with ours for adventure and news. I have spent a few hours in your most prominent car-nurseries and I haven't heard anything but profanity on the part of the owners and Broadway talk among the chauffeurs.

In the country it's different. Take a busy day at Gayley's, for instance. It usually opens about three A.M., when Gayley crawls out of bed in response to a cataract of woe over the telephone and goes out nine miles. .h.i.ther or yon to haul in some foundered brother. Gayley has a soft heart and is always going out over the country at night to reason with some erring engine; but since last April first, when he traveled six miles at two A.M. in response to a call and found a toy automobile lying bottom-side up in the road, he has become suspicious and embittered, and has raised his prices.

At six A.M. Worley Gates, who farms eight miles south, comes in to catch an early train and delivers the first bulletin. The roads to the south are drying fast, but he went down the clay hill sidewise and had to go through the bottom on low. At seven, Wimble Horn and Colonel Ackley and Sim Bone drop in while waiting for breakfast. Bone thinks he'll drive to Millford, but doesn't think he can get in an hour's business and get back by noon.

This starts the first debate of the day, Colonel Ackley contending that he has done the distance easily in an hour-ten, and Sim being frankly incredulous. Experts decide that it can be done with good roads. Colonel says he can do it in mud and can take the hills on high; says he never goes into low for anything. Bill Elwin, one of our gasless experts, reminds him of the time he couldn't get up Foster's Hill on second and was pa.s.sed by three automobiles and fourteen road roaches. This is a distinct breach of etiquette on Bill's part, for he was riding with Colonel at the time and should have upheld him. The discussion is just getting good when Ackley's wife calls him home to breakfast over the 'phone, and the first tourist of the day comes in.

He has come from the west and has had heavy weather. He asks about the roads east. Gibb Ogle, our leading pessimist, hastens to inform him that very likely the roads are impa.s.sable, because the Highway Commissioners have been improving them. Out our way road improvement consists of tearing the roads out with a sc.r.a.per and heaping them up in the middle.

It takes a road almost a year to recover from a good, thorough case of improvement.

The stranger goes on dejectedly, and about nine A.M. young Andy Link roars in with his father's car, which he has taken away from the old man and converted into a racer by the simple process of taking off the m.u.f.fler and increasing the noise to one hundred miles per hour. Andy declares that there has been no rain to the northwest and that he has done sixty miles already this morning, but can't get his carbureter to working properly, as usual. By this time several owners and a dozen critics have a.s.sembled, and the morning debate on gasoline versus motor spirit takes place. It ends a tie and both sides badly winded, when Pelty Amthorne drives in, very mad. He has been over to Paynesville and back. This is only twenty miles, but owing to the juicy and elusive condition of the roads, his rear wheels have traveled upward of two thousand miles in negotiating the distance and he has worn out two rear casings.

Right here I wish to state that Homeburg roads are not always muddy. We average three months of beautiful, smooth, resilient and joltless roads each year. The remaining nine months, however, I mention with pain.

Illinois boosters say our beautiful rich black soil averages ten feet in depth, but I think this understates the case--at least our beautiful black dirt roads seem to be deeper than that in the spring. What we need in the spring in Illinois are locks and harbor lights, and the man who invents an automobile buoyant enough to float on its stomach and paddle its way swiftly to and fro on the heaving bosom of our April roads will be a public benefactor.

Pelty is justly indignant, because he had hoped to get another thousand miles of actual travel out of his tires. We sympathize with him, but in the middle of his grief Chet Frazier drives up. When he sees his ancient enemy, he climbs out of his car, comes hastily over to where Pelty is erupting, and starts trading autos with him.

Did you ever hear a couple of seasoned horse traders discussing each other's wares? Horse traders are considerate and tender of each other's feelings compared with two rural automobile owners who are talking swap with any enthusiasm.

"h.e.l.lo, Pelty," says Chet. "Separator busted again?"

Everybody laughs, and Chet walks all around the machine. "Why, it ain't a separator at all," he finally says. "What is it, Pelty?"

"If you'd ever owned an automobile you'd know," grunts Amthorne, hauling off a tire. "What's become of that tinware exhibit you used to block up traffic with?"

Chet gets the laugh this time.

"That tinware exhibit stepped over from Jenniesburg in thirty minutes flat this morning," says Chet. "Lucky you weren't on the road. I'd have thrown mud on your wind shield."

"Say!" Pelty shouts. "Your machine couldn't fall ten miles in thirty minutes. Why don't you get a real automobile? What will you give me to boot for mine?"

They are off, and business in the vicinity suspends.

"I'll trade with you, Pelty," says Chet calmly--quite calmly. "Let me look it over."

He walks carefully around the auto, opens the hood and looks in. "Funny engine, isn't it? I saw one like that at the World's Fair."

Pelty has the hood of Chet's machine open too and is right there with the retort courteous. "Is this an engine or a steam heater?" he asks.

"What pressure does she carry?"

"She never heats at all except when I run a long time on low," Chet says eagerly.

"Oh, yes," says Pelty, "I never have to go into low much--"

"Gosh!" Chet explodes. "When you go up Sanders Hill, they have to close two district schools for the noise."

"Only time you ever heard me I was hauling you up with your broken jack-shaft," snorts Pelty. "You ought to get some iron parts for your car. Cheese has gone out of style."

"You still use it for tires, I see," says Chet.