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Moisture, A Trace
by
“Road runner,” said Bill, with a short laugh. “Remember how they used to rack along in front of a hoss for miles, keeping just ahead, lettin’ out a link when you spurred up? Aggravatin’ fowl! They got over tryin’ to keep ahead of gasoline.”
In the white alkaline road lay one lone, pyramidal rock. It was about the size of one’s two fists and all its edges and corners were sharp. Probably twenty miles of clear space lay on either flank of that rock. Nevertheless, our right front wheel hit it square in the middle. The car leaped straight up, the rock popped sidewise, and the tire went off with a mighty bang. Bill put on the brakes, deliberately uncoiled himself, and descended.
“Seems like tires don’t last no time at all in this country,” he remarked, sadly. He walked around the car and began to examine the four wrecks he carried as spares. After some inspection of their respective merits, he selected one. “I just somehow kain’t git over the notion she ought to sidestep them little rocks and holes of her own accord,” he exclaimed. “A hoss is a plumb, narrow-minded critter, but he knows enough for that.”
While he changed the tire–which incidentally involved patching one of half a dozen over-worn tubes–I looked her over more in detail. The customary frame, strut rods, and torsion rods had been supplemented by the most extraordinary criss-cross of angle-iron braces it has ever been my fortune to behold. They ran from anywhere to everywhere beneath that car. I began to comprehend her cohesiveness.
“Jim Coles, blacksmith at the O T, puts them braces in all our cars,” explained Bill. “He’s got her down to a system.”
The repair finished and the radiator refilled we resumed the journey. It was now just eleven o’clock. The odometer reading was 29,276. The temperature was well up toward 100 degrees. But beneath the disreputable top, and while in motion, the heat was not noticeable. Nevertheless, the brief stop had brought back poignantly certain old days–choking dust, thirst, the heat of a heavy sun, the long day that led one nowhere—-
The noon mirages were taking shape, throwing stately and slow their vast illusions across the horizon. Lakes glimmered; distant ranges took on the forms of phantasm, rising higher, flattening, reaching across space the arches of their spans, rendering unreal a world of beauty and dread. That in the old days was the deliberate fashion the desert had of searing men’s souls with her majesty. Slowly, slowly, the changes melted one into the other; massively, deliberately the face of the world was altered; so that at last the poor plodding human being, hot, dry, blinded, thirsty, felt himself a nothing in the presence of eternities. Well I knew that old spell of the desert. But now! Honestly, after a few minutes I began to feel sorry for the poor old desert! Its spells didn’t work for the simple reason that we didn’t give it time! We charged down on its phantom lakes and disproved them and forgot them. We broke right in on the dignified and deliberate scene shifting of mountains and mesas, showed them up for the brittle, dry hills they were, and left them behind. It was pitiful! It was as though a revered tragedian should overnight find that his vogue had departed; that he was no longer getting over; that an irreverent upstart, breaking in on his most sonorous periods, was getting laughs with slang. We had lots of water; the dust we left behind; it wasn’t even hot in the wind of our going!
In the shallow crease of hills a shimmer of white soon changed to evident houses. We drew into a straggling desert town.
It was typical–thirty miles from the railroad, a distributing point for the cattle country. Four broad buildings with peeled, sunburned faces, a wooden house or so, and a dozen flat-roofed adobe huts hung pleasingly with long strips of red peppers. Of course one of the wooden buildings was labelled General Store; and another, smaller, contained a barber shop and postoffice combined. The third was barred and unoccupied. The fourth had been a livery stable but was now a garage. Six saddle horses and six Fords stood outside the General Store, which was a fair division.