CHAPTER V
NIBBLING AT THE MAP OF TEXAS
VISITING an ostrich farm is as thrilling as going in wading, but to be thorough, we did our duty by San Antonio’s plumed and gawky giants before starting again on our well-nigh hopeless task of making an impression on the State of Texas.
When we looked at our mileage record we were encouraged, only to be cast down again by a glance at the map, whose south-west corner we had only begun to nibble at in six days’ faithful plodding. It was an incentive to an early start. We filled our tank with gas at the tiled station near the Alamo, rejoicing in the moderate price. In one respect, at least, Texas is the motorists’s paradise. Gasoline is cheap, oil is cheap, storage for the night ranges from “two bits” to half a dollar, while clear weather and local honesty make it possible to avoid even that expense by leaving the car overnight in the Garage of the Blue Sky. Tires are mended and changed for a quarter, and in some places for nothing. And garage-keepers are honest,—except when, yielding to local patriotism, they describe the state of the roads.
For three miles we meandered through San Antonio’s “Cabbage Patch,” steering around tin cans, Mexican babies, and goats taking the freedom of the city, until we came to a fine broad macadam in good repair,—our first real road since the ill-fated stretch outside Houston.Mexicans hung outside their little shops, whose festoons of onions and peppers painted Italy into the landscape. Overhead, we counted dozens of airplanes, some from the government school, others from Katharine Stinson’s modest hangars, making the most of the weather. One coquetted with us, following us for several miles. We leaned out and waved, but at that, it was a most impersonal form of flirtation. Not a quiver of the great wings, not a swoop through the blue, rewarded our abandon. I wish I might record otherwise, for a moment later a rusty nail had flattened our back tire, and we were left alone on the prairie to solve the problem of changing the heavy rims, which our combined strength could hardly lift. How romantic and happy a touch could be added to this narrative if at this point I could state that the airman fluttered to our feet, saluted, changed the tire, and then circled back to the blue. But, doubtless himself from Boston, he did no such thing. He kept steadily on his course, till he was only a speck in our lives. If the cautious man reads this, let him know he is forgiven the tire, but not the climax.
We had been airy, at home, when they mentioned the tires. There were, nevertheless, internal doubts. Massachusetts is too crowded with garages to furnish much practice in wayside repairing, and I had been lucky. But now came the test. Theoretically, we understood the process, but jacks go up when they should go down, nuts rust, and rims warp. We searched the horizon for help, found none, pulled out the tools, and got down in the mud.
Our jack was the kind whose advertisements show an immaculate young lady in white daintily propelling ahandle at arm’s length, while the car rises easily in the air. Admitting she has the patience of Job, the strength of Samson, and the ingenuity of the devil, I should like to meet her just long enough to ask her if she stood off at arm’s length while she put the jack in place, rescued it as it toppled over, searched vainly for a solid spot in which the jack would not sink, pulled it out of the mud again, pushed the car off as it rolled back on her, hunted for stones to prop it up, and a place in the axles where the arm would fit, and then had the latch give way and be obliged to do it all over again. And, with no reflections on the veracity of the lady or her inspired advertiser, I should demand the address of her pastor and her laundress.
We worked half an hour jacking up the car. No sooner had we got it where it should be, than the car’s weight sank it in the mud, and we had to begin again our snail process. To my delight, Toby was fascinated by the thing, and from that hour claimed it as her own. We mutually divided the labor as our tastes and talents dictated. It seemed that Toby revelled in handling tools, which dropped from my inept grasp, while my sense of mechanics and experience surpassed hers. I was to be the diagnostician, she the surgeon. In other words, I bossed the job, while she did the work.
While Toby struggled with the jack a Mexican on a flea-bitten cayuse slouched on the horizon. He was black and hairy, and one “six-gun” in his teeth would have signed his portrait as Captain of the Bandits. I stopped him and asked him to lend us his brute strength, which he smilingly did, pleased as a child at being initiated into the sacred mysteries of motoring. When I allowed himto propel the socket-wrench his cup ran over. He did everything backward, but he furnished horse-sense, which we lacked, and when we attempted to lift heavy weights, he courteously supplanted us. The three of us invented a lingua franca in Mexican, Italian, French and musical terms.
“Tire,—avanti!” Gesture of lifting. Groan,—signifying great weight.
“Troppo,—troppo! Largo, largo! Ne faites pas ça! Ah-h, si, si,—bono hombre, multo, multo bono hombre!”
Thus encouraged, he worked willingly and faithfully, and at the end of a half hour’s toil, waved aside our thanks, untied his weary cayuse, and raised his sombrero. He had not robbed us nor beaten us, but had acted as one Christian to another. I ran after him saying fluently, as if I had known the language all my life, “Multo, multo, beaucoup bono hombre.” He showed his brilliant teeth. I offered him money, which he at first refused. “Bono hombre,” I insisted, “Cigarettos!” And so he took it, much pleased. He thoroughly enjoyed the episode. I hope his boss did, when he arrived an hour late. Toby enjoyed the episode, too, and persisted in sending home postcards, on which she spoke of being rescued by a Mexican bandit.
During the morning several little towns,—all alike, flitted by us,—Sabinal, Hondo, Dunlay. At Hondo, where the mud was thickest, we stopped at a little general store for lunch. The proprietor, a tall, vague man, discussed earnestly, as one connoisseur to another, the merits of the various tinned goods he submitted, and after a leisurely chat and several purchases, in which the matter of trade became secondary, he urged on us several paintedsticks of candy, a new kind which he said he enjoyed sucking during his solitary guard at the store. After the customary, “You’re a long ways from home,” he bade us goodbye, hopefully but sadly, as one would a consumptive great-aunt about to take a trip to the North Pole, and watched us bump out of sight.
We had twenty miles of such luxuriant mud that we stopped to photograph it. It is only slight exaggeration to say that the ruts came to the camera’s level. Then we forded the Neuces River, a stream woven into early Texan history, and began to climb out of the land of cotton into the grazing country. The herds and herds of sheep and white angora goats we now encountered made a charming landscape but an irritating episode. A large flock of silly sheep rambled halfway to our car, then, frightened, fled in the other direction, turning again with those they met, who also faced and fled, baa-ing; no militia could clear the traffic they disorganized. Each herd we met meant a wasted half hour. Their herders sat their horses in grim patience, with the infinite contempt shepherds get for their charges and for life in general. Out here, “being the goat” takes a new and dignified meaning—for a goat is placed with each hundred sheep to steer the brainless mass, act as leaders in danger, and furnish the one brain of the herd.
These pastoral happenings delayed us, until toward night we climbed dark dunes into a clear golden sunset. Through a gate we entered what seemed to be a cattle track through a large ranch, but was in fact the main highway to El Paso. The roads in this part of the country cut through large holdings, and the pestiferous cattle gate begins to bar the road, necessitating stopping,crossing, shutting the gate again, several times a mile. And let me warn the traveling Easterner that not to leave a gate as you find it is in truth a crime against hospitality, for one is often on private property.
Queer blunt mesas rose on all sides of us, and when dark came upon us we had entered a small canyon, and were winding to the top and down again out of the hills. The cattlegates and rocky road made going slow, and as Venus, frosty and brilliant, came out, we were imprisoned in this weirdly gloomy spot, on the top of the world. A quaver in Toby’s usually stalwart voice made me wonder if she were remembering her mother’s last words,—“Don’t drive at night.” This is no reflection on Toby’s staunchness; the immensity of the West, after dark, when first it looms above one used to the coziness of ordered streets, must always seem portentous and awful. We hastened on, winding down through one enchanting glade after another, till we met the highway again. Toby took the wheel, and we hummed along. Suddenly a stone struck the engine, and a deafening roar like that of an express train frightened us. Something vital, by its clatter, had been shattered, and we again faced the possibility of delay and frustration—even retreat. We got out and searched for the trouble. Luckily we had that day unpacked our flash-light, for Venus, though she looked near enough to pick out of the sky, furnished poor illumination for engine troubles. Search revealed an important looking pipe beneath the car broken in two, with a jagged fracture. Should we chance driving on, or camp till morning?
We were tired and our pick-up lunch of deviled ham and crackers seemed long ago. After a hard day’s run,the difficulties of making camp in the dark, with our equipment still unpacked, and going cold and supperless to bed loomed large. Besides, there could not have been worse camping ground in the world. Soggy cotton fields under water on both sides gave us the choice of sleeping in the middle of the road or on the back seat piled high with baggage. The engine, though roaring like a wounded lioness, still ran steadily. I knew just enough to realize we had broken the exhaust pipe, but hardly enough to know whether running the car under such conditions would maim it for life. But though hunger won out, the real mechanic’s love for his engine was born in us, and feeling like parents who submit their only child to a major operation, we drove painfully at eight miles an hour the ten miles into B——, the town echoing to our coming.
The village was a mere cross-roads, a most unlikely place for a night’s stop, picturesque and Mexican, with low ’dobe houses, yellow and pink, the noise of a phonograph from each corner, and lighted doorways filled with slouching Mexicans and trig American doughboys from a nearby camp,—and everywhere else, Rembrantian gloom. At a new tin garage with the universal Henry’s name over the door we were relieved to learn we had done no damage. Most of the cars in town had, in fact, broken their exhaust pipes on loose stones, and ran chugging, as we had.
It is not usual for garage helpers to aid strange ladies in hunting a night’s lodging, but ours willingly let themselves be commandeered for the purpose, and the chase began. The town had a “hotel”;—which, in the South, may be a one-story café, or something less ambitious.This one, kept by a negro woman, was more than dubious looking, but when the proprietor said it was “full up,” our hearts sank. We wearily made the rounds of the village, guided by rumors of a vacant room here or there, only to find the houses, four-roomed cottages at best, filled with army wives. Our needs reduced us to Bolshevism. Passing an imposing white house, neat as wax, and two stories high, we sent our cicerone to demand for us lodging for the night. Had it been the official White House we should have done no less, and as the residence of the owner of the garage where our cripple was stored it gave us a claim on his hospitality no right-minded citizen could deny. Alas, we learned that Mr. V’s eleven hostages to fortune, rather than civic pride, accounted for the size of his house. The owner sent us a cordially regretful message that his bedrooms teemed with little V’s, but thought his brother’s daughter might take the strangers in, as her parents were away and their room vacant.
A little figure in a nightgown opened the door a crack when we knocked at their cottage.
“Who is it?” asked a Southern voice, timidly.
“Two ladies from Boston, who would like a room for the night.” We threw as much respectable matronliness as possible into our own voices. The magic word “Boston” reassured. Boston may be a dishonored prophet in Cambridge and Brookline, but to the South and West it remains autocrat of the breakfast table. I know our prospective hostess, from the respect and relief in her tones, visualized Louisa May Alcott and Julia Ward Howe waiting on her doorstep, and she hastened tothrow open the door to what we saw was her bedroom, saying “Come in! You’re a long ways——”
Boston, your stay-at-homes never realize how distant, how remote and fabulous your rock-bound shores seem to the Other Half west of the Mississippi!
It was a German Lutheran household into which we stepped. Two little tow-headed boys were curled up asleep in their sister’s room, and we tip-toed past to the parents’ vacated bedroom, ours for the night, with its mottoes, its lithographed Christ on the wall, its stove and tightly shut windows. This German family had brought over old-world peasant habits, and curiously contrasted against its bareness, promiscuity and not over scrupulous cleanliness was the American daughter who needed but a little more polish to be ready for any rung in the social ladder. She was a real little lady, as hospitable as though we had been really invited.
Supperless, footsore and weary, we tumbled into the sheets vacated by the elder V’s that morning, too grateful for shelter and the softness of the feather bed to feel squeamish. We waked in the sunshine of next morning to smell coffee brewing on our bedroom stove, and hear cautious whispers of two sturdy little Deutschers tip-toeing back and forth through our room to the wash-shed beyond, stealing awed glances at the Boston ladies in their mother’s bed. In a stage whisper one called to his sister to learn where “the comb” was. She answered that Pa had taken it to San Anton’, but after some search found them “the brush” hidden near father’s notary stamp, on the bureau,—for the father was the local judge and a man much respected in the community.
When the little boys departed for school, she broughtus coffee in the best china, apologizing for not offering us breakfast. She explained that she was to be married in three days, and was following her family to San Anton’ for the wedding. She showed us her ring, and her trousseau, all in pink, to her joy, and told us of her fiancé, who had been a second lieutenant in France. Though she seemed a child, she had refused to marry him when he left, because she believed haste at such times imprudent. And now she was all excitement over the great event, yet not too much to show a welcome as simple as it was beautiful to the midnight intruders from Boston.
As usual, our desire to pay for our lodging met a firm, almost shocked refusal. We only felt more nearly even when at El Paso we sent her something deliciously pink for her trousseau.
In Texas, overnight promises are to be discounted. Or is it not, perhaps, a universal law of the “night man” to pass on no information to the “day man?” Has the order taken a vow of silence more binding and terrible than the Dominican friars? It must be so, for never in ten years’ experience with night men, have I known one to break the seal of secrecy which prevents them letting your confidence in the matter of flat tires and empty tanks go any further. Their delicacy in keeping all news of such infirmities from the ears of the day man is universal. Nor was there any exception next morning, when we visited our garage, hopeful of an early start. The exhaust pipe was still unwelded, and our spare tire still flat. Furthermore, we were half an hour in the garage before anyone thought to mention that the resources of the place were inadequate to mend the pipe. They had trusted to our divining the fact, as the day wore on,—amore tactful way of breaking the news than coming out bluntly with the truth.
At last, a passing stranger suggested we take the car to the nearby Fort, where a new welding machine had recently been installed. We chugged up the hill, attracting the notice of several soldiers from East Boston, on whom our Massachusetts number produced a wave of nostalgia. By this time, so used were we to being beneficiaries of entire strangers that before hailing anyone likely to offer to do us a favor, we fixed smiles fairly dripping with saccharine on our faces.
A sergeant, hearing sympathetically our story, sent us to a lieutenant. He wavered.
“I hate not to oblige a lady, ma’am, but this is government property, and we aint allowed to do outside work.”
Looking at his stern face, we decided it would take at least an hour to win him over. Without moving a muscle he continued——
“But, seein’ as you’re a lady and a long ways from home, and can’t git accommodated otherwise, you run your car back to the garage and I’ll send a sergeant down to get the part, and he’ll have it welded for you in a couple of hours.”
Two hours later not only the sergeant but the lieutenant were at the garage to see that the part went back properly into the engine. Meanwhile, doubting the ethics of letting Uncle Sam be our mechanic, we had provided two boxes of Camels for our benefactors, having learned that cigarettes will often be acceptable where money will not. The part was perfectly welded, the sergeant replaced it with military efficiency, and then we exchangedconfidences. The lieutenant told us he was a “long-horn,” but had been, before the war, a foreman in the very factory which had built our car. Which explained his cordiality, if explanation were needed in a land where everyone is cordial. We found that respect for the sterling worth of our car helped us along our way appreciably,—people everywhere approved it as “a good car,” and extended their approval to its inmates. The lieutenant nonplused us by refusing both pay and tobacco, but indicated that we might bestow both on the sergeant. He asked us to let him know when we came again to Texas, and we promised willingly, thanked Uncle Sam for his chivalry by proxy, and were quickly on our way to Del Rio. Texas had not yet failed us.