She saw a dozen camping devices unknown to the East: trailers, which by

day bobbed along behind the car like coffins on two wheels, but at night

opened into tents with beds, an ice-box, a table; tents covering a bed

whose head rested on the running-board; beds made-up in the car, with

the cushions as mattresses.

The Great Transcontinental Highway was colored not by motors alone. It

is true that the Old West of the stories is almost gone; that Billings,

Miles City, Bismarck, are more given to Doric banks than to gambling

hells. But still are there hints of frontier days. Still trudge the

prairie schooners; cowpunchers in chaps still stand at the doors of log

cabins--when they are tired of playing the automatic piano; and blanket

Indians, Blackfeet and Crows, stare at five-story buildings--when they

are not driving modern reapers on their farms.

They all waved to Claire. Telephone linemen, lolling with pipes and

climber-strapped legs in big trucks, sang out to her; traction engine

crews shouted; and these she found to be her own people. Only once did

she lose contentment--when, on the observation platform of a train bound

for Seattle, she saw a Britisher in flannels and a monocle, headed

perhaps for the Orient. As the train slipped silkenly away, the Gomez

seemed slow and clumsy, and the strain of driving intolerable. And that

Britisher must be charming---- Then a lonely, tight-haired woman in the

doorway of a tar-paper shack waved to her, and in that wistful gesture

Claire found friendship.

And sometimes in the "desert" of yet unbroken land she paused by the

Great Highway and forgot the passion to keep going---She sat on a rock, by a river so muddy that it was like yellow milk. The

only trees were a bunch of cottonwoods untidily scattering shreds of

cotton, and the only other vegetation left in the dead world was

dusty green sagebrush with lumps of gray yet pregnant earth between,

or a few exquisite green and white flashes of the herb called

Snow-on-the-Mountain. The inhabitants were jackrabbits, or American

magpies in sharp black and white livery, forever trying to balance their

huge tails against the wind, and yelling in low-magpie their opinion of

tourists.

She did not desire gardens, then, nor the pettiness of plump terraced

hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to

it by her own plodding. Her soul--if she hadn't had one, it would

immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, the moment she

sat there--sailed with the hawks in the high thin air, and when it came

down it sang hallelujahs, because the sagebrush fragrance was more

healing than piney woods, because the sharp-bitten edges of the buttes

were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise, and because a real person,

one Milt Daggett, though she would never see him again, had found her

worthy of worship.




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