Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
W
<div class="poem">
<p>"Yes'm, the office is open, but I reckon yo' won't find any hands to move yo' car," was the accurate prediction of the official to whom I applied. "Pretty nearly lunch time, yo' know."
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>THERE were, we found, three ways to transport an automobile from New York to Texas; to drive it ourselves, and become mired in Southern "gumbo," to ship it by rail, and become bankrupt while waiting weeks for delivery, or, cheaper and altogether more satisfactory, to send it by freight steamer to Galveston. By this means we avoided the need of crating our lumbering vehicle; we also could calculate definitely its date of arrival, and by taking a passenger boat to New Orleans, and going thence by rail, be at the port to meet it.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Only one incident marred our satisfaction with the morning's work; we discovered, on saying farewell to Reggi, that we had been calling him by his first name!
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>"Here's where I broke my axle," shouted my pilot. To break the shock meant to stick; to race ahead might mean a shattered car. There was no time to think it over. I pushed down on the gas. A fearful bump, and we went on, the mud sucking at the tires with every inch we advanced. Cheering, the others picked their way to us. Our friends piled our baggage into the tonneau. Toby and I looked at each other, worried by the same problem,—the problem that never ceased to bother us until we reached Chicago;—to tip or not to tip?
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Our trunk made us trouble from the start. The administration had given us to understand we might ship it with the car, but at the last moment this was prevented by a constitutional amendment. Accordingly, an hour before our boat left, we took the trunk to the line on which we were to travel, and shipped it as personal baggage. It was only the first of many experiences which persuaded us to adopt the frontiersman's motto, "Pack light."
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Our baggage we stowed in a peculiarly shaped auto trunk containing five peculiarly shaped suitcases, trapezoids all,—not a parallelepiped among them. Made to fit an earlier car, in its day it had been the laughing stock of all the porters in Europe. Too bulky to be strapped outside, it was to become a mysterious occupant of the tonneau, exciting much speculation and comment. It was to be the means of our being taken for Salvation lassies with a parlor organ, bootleggers, Spiritualists with the omnipresent cabinet, show-girls or lady shirt-waist drummers, according to the imagination of the beholder; but it never was aught but a nuisance. Whatever we needed always reposed in the bottom-most suitcase, and rather than dig down, we did without. Next time, I shall know better. A three-piece khaki suit, composed of breeches, short skirt split front and back, and many-pocketed Norfolk coat, worn with knee-high elk boots, does for daily wear in camping, riding or driving. It sheds rain, heat and cold, does not wrinkle when slept in, and only mellows with successive accumulations of dirt. For dress occasions, a dark jersey coat and skirt, wool stockings and low oxfords is magnificence itself. A heavy and a light sweater, two flannel and a half dozen cotton or linen shirts, and sufficient plain underwear suffice for a year's knocking about. Add to this a simple afternoon frock of non-wrinkling material, preferably black, and no event finds you unprepared.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Six months later we were to cross the Mississippi near the headwaters not many miles from Canada. More lovely, there at the North, its broad, clear placid waters shadowed by green forests and high bluffs, it invites for a voyage of discovery.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>The last night of the voyage, when the clear bright green of the Gulf of Mexico gave place to the turbulent coffee color of the Mississippi, our stewardess knocked.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>"Sixty-three? That's not fast. When you get going ninety-five to a hundred, that's something like driving."
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Eating? There should be a word coined to distinguish ordinary eating from eating at Antoine's. The building is modest and the lettering plain, as befits the dignity of the place. The interior, plainly finished and lined with mirrors, resembles any one of five hundred un-noteworthy restaurants where business New York eats to get filled. There the resemblance stops. A sparkle, restrained and sober withal, rests on the mirrors, the glasses and the silver. The floors and woodwork have a well scrubbed look. The linen is carefully looked after, the china business-like; everything decent, adequate, spotless,—nothing to catch the eye. It is not visual aestheticism which lures us here, or causes the millionaire Manhattanite to order his private car to take him to Antoine's for one hour of bliss. Antoine is an interior decorator of subtler but more potent distinction. And I would go even farther than that New York multi-millionaire whose name spells Aladdin to Americans; for such a meal as Antoine served us that morning, I would travel the same distance in one of those wife-killing contrivances which are the bane of every self-respecting motorist.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>"Never! You will be as safe—or safer than you are in New York City." Toby was disappointed, but I heard him with relief. By nature gun-shy, I have seen too many war-dramas not to know that a pistol never shoots the person originally aimed at. The procedure never varies. A pulls a gun, points it at B. B, unflinching, engages A in light conversation. Diverted, A absent-mindedly puts down the gun, which B picks up, shooting to kill. I realized that as B my chances were better than as A, for while I would surely fall under the spell of a western outlaw's quaint humor and racy diction and thus hand over the weapon into his keeping, the chances were that he might be equally undermined by our Boston r's, and the appeal to his rough Western chivalry which we intended to make. Toby held out for an ammonia pistol. We did debate this for a while, but in the excitement of buying our tent we forgot the pistol entirely.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>But we still had to conquer a black stretch of about one hundred yards, in which one of our rescuers had broken an axle, so he cheerfully told us, only yesterday. We were faced with the problem to advance or retreat? Either way was mud. We might get caught between two morasses, and starve to death before the sun dried the roads. We might turn back, but why return to conditions we had worked two hours to escape? We decided to advance boldly, and, if need be, gloriously break an axle. "Race her for all she's worth," counseled the livelier of our rescuers, from the running board where he acted as pilot. I raced her, though it nearly broke my heart to mistreat the engine so cruelly. We wavered, struck a rut, and were gripped in it, as in the bonds of matrimony, for better or worse. It led us to a gruesome mass of "soup," with a yawning hole at the bottom.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>While Toby, looking and acting like a guilty wretch, piled the baggage into the car, I approached Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Poole, who stood watching the rescued leviathan with eyes gleaming satisfaction, and put the usual timid question.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>And before we could turn around to carry out his injunction, half the crowd had melted away!
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Since Houston we had learned the full meaning of Texas optimism. "Roads are splendid, ma'am. I think you'll git through," we mentally labeled as "probably passable." But when we heard, in the same soft, gentle monotone, "Pretty poor roads, ma'am; I think yo'll boag," we knew we should "boag"—bog to the hubs in a plaster of Paris cast. At Richmond, where they told us that the roads which Houston had described as "splendid" were quite impassable, we sadly learned that to a Texan, any road twenty miles away is a "splendid road," ten miles away is "pretty fair," but at five, "you'll sure boag."
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>In a flash he countered.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Toby chatted with her soldier and I with mine, who was a mechanician at the flying field. It was a disappointment not to have him an aviator, though he admitted a mechanician's was a far weightier responsibility. Before the war, he had been a professional racer, had come in second in a championship race between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and gave such good reasons why he hadn't come in first that he seemed to have taken a mean advantage of the champion.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>When we had separated ourselves from our baggage, we examined the springs. By a miracle they were intact. In first gear, the car took a standing jump, and emerged from the hole. For one of her staid matronly build, she did very well at her first attempt. Later she learned to leap boulders, and skip lightly from precipice to precipice and if we could have kept her in training six months longer, she could have walked out halfway on a tightrope, turned around and got back safely to land.
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Profusely my guide protested he had merely meditated a short cut to the station house. Elaborately he explained the route he had intended to take. Poor chap, D'Artagnan himself could not have schemed more nimbly to rescue a lady from the Bastille. I saw how his mad-cap mind had visioned the quiet turn down the side street, the doubling on our tracks, the lightning change of himself into the driver's seat, a gray Cadillac streaking ninety miles an hour past the scattering populace of Houston, then breathless miles on into the safety of the plains—the ladies rescued, himself a hero——
</p>
</div> +
<div class="poem">
<p>Stung, I put my foot on the gas, and the speedometer needle swung to the right. As we merged with the traffic of Houston, shell-holes were left behind us, and passing cars were taking advantage of a perfect concrete road. A Hudson with a Texas number passed us with a too insistent horn, the driver smiled scornfully and looked back, and his three children leaned out from the back to grin. And they were only going a miserable thirty. The near-champion looked impotently at the steering wheel, and in agonized tones commanded, "Step on it!"
</p>
</div> +
