"Yes," breathed the newspaper man.
"Well," said Mr. Stevers, "the first thing I'd like to tell you, young man, is about the car. You won't believe this, but we've been making twenty miles on a gallon, that is, averaging twenty miles on each and every gallon, sir, since we left San Francisco. Pretty good, eh?"
On a piece of scratch paper the newspaper man obediently wrote, "twenty miles, gallon."
"And then," went on the spokesman for the wanderers, "Our speed, eh? You'd like to know that? Well, without stretching the thing at all, and you can verify it from any of my party, we've averaged twenty-six miles an hour all the time out. I tell you the old boat had to travel some to do that."
'"Twenty-six miles," scribbled the newspaper man, adding after it, "The man's an idiot."
Mr. Stevers, unmindful, loosened up. The price of gasoline. The price of breakfasts. The condition of the roads. How long a stretch they had been able to do without a halt. How many hours a day he himself had stuck at the wheel. When he had finished the newspaper man bowed and walked abruptly away.
* * * * *
The newspaper man's thoughts form a conclusion.
"It's true, then," he thought, "the world's becoming as stupid as it looks. People are drying up inside with facts, figures, dollar signs. This man and his party would have got as much out of their cross-country trip if they'd all been blindfolded and shot through a tunnel two thousand feet under the ground. Man is like an audience and he has walked out on mystery and adventure. The show kind of tired him. And got his goat. It would have been a good yarn otherwise, the motor vagabonds. I'd have ended with Hovey's verse:
"I must forth again tomorrow,
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea."