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.