“Oh, but you have, sir—the pleasure of meeting you both and some of your green corn.”
He picked me a half-dozen ears, and when I offered to pay him, he said, “Please, no!”
He asked where we were from. “The East sounds very far away. I wonder if I shall ever see it again.”
I gave one of the children a dollar, and returned with my precious corn, which the good-natured Irish cook boiled to a rock for our supper.
There was a small piazza in front of our room, the only place to sit except in the street or in the private parlor of the family. The moon was coming up over the distant mountain, red as blood and big as a cart-wheel. While we were getting cool and enjoying the scene, Mary appeared with the remainder of the raw meat, saying:
“We put it out here to keep cool; there ain’t no ice in this hole of a place. I’m going to leave first of September. Gee, but I’ll be glad! They couldn’t hire me to stay here any longer for fifty dollars a month!” (She evidently felt that it was up to her to entertain us.) “Nothing but work and heat—and not even a movie!”
“How early can we get breakfast?”
“Seven o’clock. I wouldn’t get up before that for President Wilson.” (The picture of President and Mrs. Wilson in that place made us smile.)
“Try a little vamping on Mary,” I suggested to friend husband. It worked. She called us at five, and by six we were out again on the desert, with the sun rising behind us, and Montello, the next town, 115 miles to the west.
That day stands out as the worst experience of the trip. We went fifty miles without seeing a living creature except jack-rabbits and one coyote. The coyote ran across the trail and stopped fifty feet away, watching us drive by. The sand was deeper and the chuck-holes, even with the most careful driving, seemed to rack the car to pieces. If we had had an accident, the outlook would have been decidedly vague for us. Not a car or a telegraph pole in sight. By ten o’clock that morning the sun scorched our skin through our clothing. But we had one good laugh. Over a deep chuck-hole there had been built a stone bridge. On one end, in large black letters, was “San Francisco” (the first sign we had seen with that welcome name) and on the other end was “New York”! The incongruity struck us as being so absurd that we roared with laughter. Here in this God-forsaken desert, a “thousand miles from anywhere,” to see that sign! It took some joker to conceive of that.