Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
F
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<p>"You're dead right. Fierce is the word. Nev' will sleep in my duds again, puss. That is, when I have a reg'lar human bed. Course camping, different. But still—— Let's see all the funny things we can do to us."
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<p>Milt had, in his two years of high school in St. Cloud, and in his boyhood under the genial but abstracted eye of the Old Doctor, learned that it was not well thought of to use the knife as a hod and to plaster mashed potatoes upon it, as was the custom in Mac's Old Home Lunch at Schoenstrom. But the arts of courteously approaching oysters, salad, and peas were rather unfamiliar to him. Now he studied forks as he had once studied carburetors, and he gave spiritual devotion to the nice eating of a canned-shrimp cocktail—a lost legion of shrimps, now two thousand miles and two years away from their ocean home.
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<p>On the hill five miles to eastward, a line of dust, then a small car. As it approached, the driver must have sighted her and increased speed. He came up at thirty-five miles an hour.
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<p>"Now, no superiority! He's probably never seen a real vaudeville show. Wouldn't it be fun to take him to the Winter Garden or the Follies for the first time!... Instead of being taken by Jeff Saxton, and having the humor, oh! so articulately explained!"
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<p>"Now we'll get something done! Look! It's a bug—a flivver or a Teal or something. I believe it's the young man that got us out of the mud."
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<p>She had had to put the car at that hole. It dropped, far down, and it stayed down. The engine stalled. She started it, but the back wheels spun merrily round and round, without traction. She did not make one inch. When she again killed the blatting motor, she let it stay dead. She peered at her father.
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<p>She had learned to call the slews "pugholes," and to watch for ducks at twilight. She had learned that about the pugholes flutter choirs of crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.
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<p>"Yep. Sure. Fact, there's a car comin' toward us. 'Bout a mile away I'd make it, wouldn't you? Well, dollface, if you make one peep—over the bank you go, both of you dead as a couplin'-pin. Smeared all over those rocks. Get me? And me—I'll be sorry the regrettable accident was so naughty and went and happened—and I just got off in time meself. And I'll pinch papa's poke while I'm helping get out the bodies!"
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<p>"I usually get t'ree dollars, but I dunno as I vant to do it for less than four. Today I ain'd feelin' very goot," grumbled the golden-hearted.
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<p>"I know. Of course. He probably works hard in a garage, and is terribly nice to his mother and sisters at home. I mean—— I wouldn't want the dear lamb to be a devoted knight, though. Too thankless a job."
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<p>"Oh! So he's still working that old gag! I've heard all about Adolph. He keeps that harness for pulling out cars, and it always busts. The last time, though, he only charged six bits to get it mended. Now let me reason with him."
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<p>Thus her tired brain, like a squirrel in a revolving cage, while she sat primly and scraped at a clot of rust on a tin plate and watched him put on the bacon and eggs. Wondering if cats were used for this purpose in the Daggett family, she put soaked, unhappy Vere de Vere on her feet, to her own great comfort and the cat's delight. It was an open car, and the rain still rained, and a strange young man was a foot from her tending the not very crackly fire, but rarely had Claire felt so domestic.
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<p>"Sorry I had to kid him along. I was afraid he really would drive you off the bank. He was a bad actor. And he was right; he could have licked me. Thought maybe I could jolly him into getting off, and have him pinched, next town."
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<p>She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.
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<p>Now he laughed and whooped; he drove with one foot inelegantly and enchantingly up on the edge of the cowl; he made Lady Vere de Vere bow to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening—twice, in Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk, but—— All those hills to sail over and—— Come on! Lez sail!"
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<p>She came up a muddy lane to a muddy farmyard, with a muddy cur yapping at her wet legs, and geese hissing in a pool of purest mud serene. The house was small and rather old. It may have been painted once. The barn was large and new. It had been painted very much, and in a blinding red with white trimmings. There was no brass plate on the house, but on the barn, in huge white letters, was the legend, "Adolph Zolzac, 1913."
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<p>The countess said that she did indeed have an extraordinarily punk time, and she sang to Milt the hymn of the little gods of the warm hearth. Then Milt's evening dissipations were over. Schoenstrom has movies only once a week. He sat in the office of his garage ruffling through a weekly digest of events. Milt read much, though not too easily. He had no desire to be a poet, an Indo-Iranian etymologist, a lecturer to women's clubs, or the secretary of state. But he did rouse to the marvels hinted in books and magazines; to large crowds, the mechanism of submarines, palm trees, gracious women.
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