“Well, then, you had better take the train and go and see them!” Indifferently he took down another map and made a few casual blue marks on the mountains of Pennsylvania. “They’re rebuilding roads that will be fine later in the season, but at the moment [April, 1915] all of these places are detours. You’ll get bad grades and mud over your hubs! Of course, if you’re set on going that way, if you want to burn any amount of gasoline, cut your tires to pieces, and strain your engine—go along to St. Louis. It’s all the same to me; I don’t own the roads! But you said you wanted to take a motor trip.”
“Then Chicago is much the best way?”
“It is the only way!”
He did not wait for my agreement, but throwing aside the second map and turning again to the first, his pencil swooped down upon Buffalo and raced to Cleveland as though it fitted in a groove. He seemed to be in a mental aeroplane looking actually down upon the roads below.
“There is a detour you will have to take here. You turn left at a white church. This stretch is dusty in dry weather, but along here,” his pencil had now reached Iowa and Nebraska, “you will have no trouble at all—if it doesn’t rain.”
“And if it rains?”
“Well, you can get out your solitaire pack!”
“For how long?” The vision of the sort of road it must be if that man thought it impassable was hard to imagine.
“Oh, I don’t know; a week or two, even three maybe. But when they are dry there are no faster roads in the country. What kind of a car are you going in?”