“I am sincere,” he protested, putting away his pipe.
“But the things you’re saying are the things the right sort of person refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of their operation.”
“Yes, that’s quite true, in drawing-rooms,” he airily amended. “But this is God’s open and untrammeled prairie.”
“Where crudeness is king,” I added.
“Where candor is worth more than convention,” he corrected, with rather a wistful look in his eye. “And where we mortals ought to be at least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with the chinook arch across it.”
He wasn’t flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home happened to be.
“I’ve just come from up North!” he said. And that, I promptly realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question, especially as there was a California license-number on the front of his car.
“And what’s your business?” I inquired, deciding to try him out with still one more honest question.
“I’m a windmill man,” he told me, as he waded in toward his dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him literally, for there wasn’t anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I’d already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren’t the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his own petard.
“Then you’re just the man I’m looking for,” I told him. He stopped for a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an inner tube.