You Ask Anybody

by B. M. Bower

He began seriously to think of selling his car and going back to horses which, in spite of the high cost of feeding them, had paid their way and his, and left him a pleasant jingle in his pockets. And then he bumped hard into one of those queer little psychological facts which men never take into account until it is too late.

Casey Ryan, who had driven horses since he could stand on his toes and fling harness on their backs, could not go back to driving horses. The speed fiend of progress had him by the neck. Horses were too slow for Casey. Moreover, the thirty-mile stretch between Pinnacle and Lund was too tame for him, too monotonous. He knew in the dark every twist in the road, every sharp turn, and he could tell you offhand what every sharp turn had cost him in the past month, either in repairs to his own car or to the car that had unluckily met him without warning. For Casey, I must tell you, forgot all about that ear-splitting klaxon at his left elbow. He was always in too much of a hurry to blow it, anyway, and by the time he reached a turn he was around it, and there either was no car in the road or Casey had already scraped paint off it or worse. So what was the use?

Far distances called Casey. In one day, he meditated, he could cover more desert with his Ford than horses could travel in a week. An old, half-buried passion stirred, lifted its head, and smiled at him seductively. He would go away into the far distances and look for the riches which Nature hides so miserly in her hills. A gold mine, or perhaps silver or copper—what matter which mineral he found, so long as it spelled wealth for him? Then he would buy a bigger car and a faster car, and he would bore farther and farther into yonder. In his past were tucked away months on end of tramping across deserts and up mountain defiles, with a packed burro nipping patiently along in front of him and this same, seductive passion for finding one of Nature’s little hoards of mineral beckoning him over the next horizon. Burros had been slow. While he hurtled down the road from Pinnacle to Lund Casey pictured himself plodding through sand and sage and over malapi and up dry cañons, hazing a burro before him.

“No, sir, the time for that is gone by. I could do in a week now what it took me a month to do then. I could get into country a man’d hate to tackle afoot, not knowing the water holes. I’ll git me a radiator that don’t boil a tea kettle over a pitch fire, and load up with water and grub and gas, and I’ll find something that’ll put me in the clear the rest of my life. Couldn’t before, because I had to travel too slow. But shucks! A Ford can go anywhere a mountain goat can go. You ask anybody.”

So Casey sold his stage line and the good will that went with it, and Pinnacle and Lund breathed long and deep and planned trips they had refrained from taking heretofore, and wished Casey luck. Bill, the garage man, laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and made a suggestion so wise that not even Casey could shut his mind against it.

“You’re starting out where there won’t be no Bill handy to fix what you bust,” he pointed out. “You wait over a day or two, Casey, and let me show yuh a few things about that car. If you bust down on the desert you’ll want to know what’s wrong, and how to fix it. It’s easy, but you got to know where to look for the trouble.”

“Me? Say, Bill, I never had to go lookin’ for trouble,” Casey grinned. “What do I need to learn how for?”

Nevertheless, he remained all of that day with Bill and crammed on mechanics. He was amazed to discover how many and how different were the ailments that might afflict an automobile. That he had boldly—albeit unconsciously—driven a thing filled with timers, high-tension plugs that may become fouled and fail to “spark,” carburetors that could get out of adjustment, spark plugs that burned out and had to be replaced, a transmission that absolutely must have grease or something happened, bearings that were prone to “burn out,” if they went dry of oil, and a multitude of other mishaps that could happen and did happen, if one did not watch out, would have filled Casey with foreboding, if that were possible. Being an optimist to the middle of his bones, he merely felt a growing pride in himself. He had driven all this aggregation of potential grief, and he had driven with impunity. Whenever anything had happened to his Ford autymobil, Casey could trace the direct cause, and it had always come from the outside instead of the inside, save that time when he had walked in and got a new car without probing into the vitals of the other.

“I’d ruther have a horse down with glanders,” he admitted when Bill finally washed the grease off his hands and forearms and rolled down his sleeves. “But Casey Ryan’s game to try anything once, and most things the second and third time. You ask anybody. Gimme all the hootin’-annies that’s liable to wear out, Bill, and a load uh tires and patches, and Casey’ll come back and hand yuh a diamond big as your fist, some day. Casey Ryan’s goin’ out to see what he can see. If he meets up with Miss Fortune, he’ll tame her, Bill. And this little Ford autymobil is goin’ to eat outa my hand, this summer. I don’t give a cuss if she does git sore and ram her spark plugs into her carburetor now and ag’in. She’ll know who’s boss, Bill.”

Taking that point of view and keeping it, Casey managed very well. Whenever anything went wrong that his vocabulary and a monkey wrench could not mend, Casey sat down on the shadiest running board and conned the Instruction Book which Bill handed him at the last minute. Other times he treated the Ford exactly as he would treat a burro, with satisfactory results.