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.




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