Milt turned again and came toward them, but slowly; and after he had drawn up even and switched off the engine, he snatched off his violent plaid cap and looked apologetic.
"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."
"But you had a gun-a revolver-didn't you, lad?" panted Mr. Boltwood.
"Um, wellllll--I've got a shotgun. It wouldn't take me more 'n five or ten minutes to dig it out, and put it together. And there's some shells. They may be all right. Haven't looked at 'em since last fall. They didn't get so awful damp then."
"But suppose he'd had a revolver himself?" wailed Claire.
"Gee, you know, I thought he probably did have one. I was scared blue. I had a wrench to throw at him though," confided Milt.
"How did you know we needed you?"
"Why back there, couple miles behind you, maybe I saw your father get up and try to wrestle him, so I suspected there was kind of a disagreement. Say, Miss Boltwood, you know when you spoke to me-way back there-I hadn't meant to butt in. Honest. I thought maybe as we were going--"
"Oh, I know!"
"-the same way, you wouldn't mind my trailing, if I didn't sit in too often; and I thought maybe I could help you if--"
"Oh, I know! I'm so ashamed! So bitterly ashamed! I just meant--Will you forgive me? You were so good, taking care of us--"
"Oh, sure, that's all right!"
"I fancy you do know how grateful father and I are that you were behind us, this time! Wasn't it a lucky accident that we'd slipped past you some place!"
"Yes," dryly, "quite an accident. Well, I'll skip on ahead again. May run into you again before we hit Seattle. Going to take the run through Yellowstone Park?"
"Yes, but--" began Claire. Her father interrupted:
"Uh, Mr., uh-Daggett, was it?-I wonder if you won't stay a little closer to us hereafter? I was getting rather a good change out of the trip, but I'm afraid that now--If it wouldn't be an insult, I'd beg you to consider staying with us for a consideration, uh, you know, remuneration, and you could--"
"Thanks, uh, thank you, sir, but I wouldn't like to do it. You see, it's kind of my vacation. If I've done anything I'm tickled--"
"But perhaps," Mr. Boltwood ardently begged the young man recently so abysmally unimportant, "perhaps you would consent to being my guest, when you cared to-say at hotels in the Park."
"'Fraid I couldn't. I'm kind of a lone wolf."
"Please! Pretty please!" besought Claire. Her smile was appealing, her eyes on his.
Milt bit his knuckles. He looked weak. But he persisted, "No, you'll get over this scrap with our friend. By the way, I'll put the deputy onto him, in the next town. He'll never get out of the county. When you forget him--Oh no, you can go on fine. You're a good steady driver, and the road's perfectly safe-if you give people the once-over before you pick 'em up. Picking up badmen is no more dangerous here than it would be in New York. Fact, there's lot more hold-ups in any city than in the wildest country. I don't think you showed such awfully good taste in asking Terrible Tim, the two-gun man, right into the parlor. Gee, please don't do it again! Please!"
"No," meekly. "I was an idiot. I'll be good, next time. But won't you stay somewhere near us?"
"I'd like to, but I got to chase on. Don't want to wear out the welcome on the doormat, and I'm due in Seattle, and--Say, Miss Boltwood." He swung out of the bug, cranked up, climbed back, went awkwardly on, "I read those books you gave me. They're slick-mean to say, interesting. Where that young fellow in Youth's Encounter wanted to be a bishop and a soldier and everything--Just like me, except Schoenstrom is different, from London, some ways! I always wanted to be a brakie, and then a yeggman. But I wasn't bright enough for either. I just became a garage man. And I--Some day I'm going to stop using slang. But it'll take an operation!"
He was streaking down the road, and Claire was sobbing, "Oh, the lamb, the darling thing! Fretting about his slang, when he wasn't afraid in that horrible nightmare. If we could just do something for him!"
"Don't you worry about him, dolly. He's a very energetic chap. And-- Uh--Mightn't we drive on a little farther, perhaps? I confess that the thought of our recent guest still in this vicinity--"
"Yes, and--Oh, I'm shameless. If Mohammed Milton won't stay with our car mountain, we're going to tag after him."
But when she reached the next hill, with its far shining outlook, there was no Milt and no Teal bug on the road ahead.
CHAPTER XI. SAGEBRUSH TOURISTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY
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.
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.