He paused and muttered angrily, gazing off towards the dump where crooked-necked George 61stood guard, and then he hopped out to crank up.
“Want a ride?” he asked, as he saw Virginia watching him and she hesitated and shook her head. “Come on,” he smiled, casting aside his black mood, “let’s take a little spin–just down on the desert and back. What’s going on–getting ready to move?”
He gazed with alarm at a pile of packing boxes that the Widow had marshaled on the gallery and then he looked back at Virginia. She was attired in a gown that had been very chic in the fall of nineteen ten, but, though it was scant for these bouffant days, she was the old Virginia still–slim and strong and dainty, and highbred in every line, with dark eyes that mirrored passing thoughts. She was the Virginia he had played with when Keno was booming and his own sisters had been there for company; and now after ten years he remembered the time when he had asked her, in vain, for a kiss.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said at last and Virginia stepped into the racer.
“Virginia!” reminded the Widow, and then at a glance she turned round and flung into the house. There were times and occasions when she had found it safer not to press her maternal authority too far, and the look that she received was first notice from Virginia that such an occasion had arrived. The motor began to thunder, Wiley threw in the clutch, and with a speed that was startling, 62they whipped a sudden circle and went bubbling away down the road.
It stretched on endlessly, this road across the desert, as straight as a surveyor’s line, and as they cleared the rough gulches and glided down into its immensity Virginia glanced at the desert and sighed.
“Pretty big,” he suggested and as she nodded slowly he raised his eyes to the hills. “I don’t know,” he went on, “whether you’ll like Los Angeles. You’ll get lonely for this, sometimes.”
“Yes, but not for that”–she jerked a thumb back at Keno–“that place is pretty small. What’s left, of course; but it seems to me sometimes they’re all of them lame, halt and blind. Always quarreling and backbiting and jumping each other’s claims–but–what do you think of the Paymaster?”
She shot the question at him and it occurred suddenly to Wiley that perhaps she had a programme, too.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he began, deftly changing his ground, “I’m in Dutch on that, all around. When I came home full of buckshot and the Old Man heard about it I got my orders to come back and apologize. Well, I’ll do that–to you–and you can tell your mother I’m sure sorry I went up on that dump.”