CHAPTER XMUD!!
We have struck it!
It looks pretty much as though our motor trip to San Francisco were going to end in Rochelle, Illinois.
Thirty-six miles out of Chicago we met the Lincoln Highway and from the first found it a disappointment. As the most important, advertised and lauded road in our country, its first appearance was not engaging. If it were called the cross continenttrailyou would expect little, and be philosophical about less, but the very word “highway” suggests macadam at the least. And with such titles as “Transcontinental” and “Lincoln” put before it, you dream of a wide straight road like the Route Nationale of France, or state roads in the East, and you wake rather unhappily to the actuality of a meandering dirt road that becomes mud half a foot deep after a day or two of rain!
Still we went over it easily enough until we passed De Kalb.[3]After that the only “highway” attributes left were the painted red, white and blue signs decorating the telegraph poles alongthe way. The highway itself disappeared into a wallow of mud! The center of the road was slightly turtle-backed; the sides were of thick, black ooze and ungaugeably deep, and the car waspossessed, as though it were alive, to pivot around and slide backward into it. We had no chains with us, and had passed no places where we could get any. Apart from the difficulty of keeping going on chainless tires our only danger, except that of being bogged, was in getting over the bridges that had no railings to their approaches. The car chasséd up every one, swung over toward the embankment, slewed back on the bridge, went across that steadily, and dove into the mud again! It certainly was dampening to one’s ardor for motoring. If the Lincoln Highway was like this what would the ordinary road be after it branched away at Sterling?
A little car on ahead was slithering and sliding around too, although it had four chains on it, but it did not sink in very far and it was getting along much better than we were—so much better in fact, that at the end of a few miles it slowly wobbled beyond our sight.
Finally we turned a bend and there was a little car on ahead. Not the same one however. This one evidently had no chains and was coming toward us drunkenly staggering from side to side. Gradually the lower half of it was hidden by the incline of an intervening bridge, then suddenly it disappeared altogether. When we arrived atthe bridge ourselves we saw the car in a deep ditch almost over on its side. The occupants of it, a man and a small boy, were both out and nothing, apparently, was hurt. The small boy was having a heavenly time paddling around in mud way above his knees, and the man called up to us cheerfully:
“’Twas m’own fault; I hadn’t ought to ’a’ come without chains on! No use for you to stop, thank you! You couldn’t help any and we’d only block th’road between us. A team’ll be along before long!”
Regretfully we left them and slipped and slid and staggered on for some miles more.
“Oh,” said Celia in the back, “how are we ever going upthat?” “That” was an awful embankment ahead which to look at made me feel as if I had eaten nothing for a week. It was steep, narrow, turtle-backed, with black slime, and had a terrifying drop at either side of its treacherous and unguarded edges. The car went snorting up the incline until, nearly at the top point where the drop was steepest, it balked and slid toward the edge——!
“This is the end,” I thought, wondering in the same second if any of us would fall clear. For one of those eternity-laden moments we seemed to hang poised on the brink. Then E. M. seemed almost to lift the huge weight of the machine around bodily and compel it in spite of its helplessness to crawl up, up, up on the bridge.
Glancing back at Celia, after we were safely over, she looked about as chalky and weak-kneed as I felt. A short distance further, however, we ran on the brick pavement of a town. The ragged red-brick buildings of the street we turned into were not very encouraging and we feared that again the Blue Book’s hotel description might be one of those “complimentary” ones, consisting of its paid advertisement. E. M. urged our trying to get chains and going on to Davenport, but Celia and I had all the motoring in the mud that we cared about. No matter how squalid the town, or how poor the accommodations, we meant to cross no more bridges like that last one until the roads dried! Then we made two turns like a letter Z and found ourselves in the sweetest, cleanest, newest little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim and clipped green. There was a new post-office of marble magnificence and a shopping center of big-windowed, fresh-painted, enterprising stores, but no hotel except a dingy ramshackle tavern that we took for granted was the one mentioned in the guide book. We wondered if one of the neat, sweet little houses might perhaps take us to board instead.
In front of a garage was a man with a blue coat and brass buttons, and “Fire Chief” on them. We asked him if he knew anyone at whose house we could stay until the road dried. Helooked at us and then at the car in a quizzical sort of way.
“Oh, y-es,” he drawled. “You could put up at Mrs. Blake’s, I guess.”
We asked the way to Mrs. Blake’s and then happened to remark that it was curious a town as up-to-date as this one had no good hotel. He lost his drawl immediately: “No good hotel? Well, I just guess there is a good hotel! The Collier Inn is just across that street and around the corner. It’s a fine hotel.”
We cheered up instantly. But why hadn’t he told us that sooner? He thought that “considerin’ we had asked for a boarding-house, mebbe th’ hotel it was too high-priced for us, but it was a fine hotel if we didn’t mind the cost.”
I don’t know how we had missed it. It was a fair-sized yellow brick building on a corner, a rather typical small-town commercial hotel. I went in expecting dingy darkness. The lobby looked like the office in a Maine summer resort. I asked—not that I for a moment expected to get it—for rooms with baths. The proprietor said, “Certainly,” and showed me three new little rooms, each with a little new bathroom attached.
I returned to my companions grinning like a Cheshire cat. It seemed to us as though we had found a veritable Ritz!