A little car on ahead was slithering and sliding around too, although it had four chains on it, but it did not sink in very far and it was getting along much better than we were—so much better in fact, that at the end of a few miles it slowly wobbled beyond our sight.
Finally we turned a bend and there was a little car on ahead. Not the same one however. This one evidently had no chains and was coming toward us drunkenly staggering from side to side. Gradually the lower half of it was hidden by the incline of an intervening bridge, then suddenly it disappeared altogether. When we arrived at the bridge ourselves we saw the car in a deep ditch almost over on its side. The occupants of it, a man and a small boy, were both out and nothing, apparently, was hurt. The small boy was having a heavenly time paddling around in mud way above his knees, and the man called up to us cheerfully:
“’Twas m’own fault; I hadn’t ought to ’a’ come without chains on! No use for you to stop, thank you! You couldn’t help any and we’d only block th’road between us. A team’ll be along before long!”
Regretfully we left them and slipped and slid and staggered on for some miles more.
“Oh,” said Celia in the back, “how are we ever going up that?” “That” was an awful embankment ahead which to look at made me feel as if I had eaten nothing for a week. It was steep, narrow, turtle-backed, with black slime, and had a terrifying drop at either side of its treacherous and unguarded edges. The car went snorting up the incline until, nearly at the top point where the drop was steepest, it balked and slid toward the edge——!
“This is the end,” I thought, wondering in the same second if any of us would fall clear. For one of those eternity-laden moments we seemed to hang poised on the brink. Then E. M. seemed almost to lift the huge weight of the machine around bodily and compel it in spite of its helplessness to crawl up, up, up on the bridge.
Glancing back at Celia, after we were safely over, she looked about as chalky and weak-kneed as I felt. A short distance further, however, we ran on the brick pavement of a town. The ragged red-brick buildings of the street we turned into were not very encouraging and we feared that again the Blue Book’s hotel description might be one of those “complimentary” ones, consisting of its paid advertisement. E. M. urged our trying to get chains and going on to Davenport, but Celia and I had all the motoring in the mud that we cared about. No matter how squalid the town, or how poor the accommodations, we meant to cross no more bridges like that last one until the roads dried! Then we made two turns like a letter Z and found ourselves in the sweetest, cleanest, newest little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim and clipped green. There was a new post-office of marble magnificence and a shopping center of big-windowed, fresh-painted, enterprising stores, but no hotel except a dingy ramshackle tavern that we took for granted was the one mentioned in the guide book. We wondered if one of the neat, sweet little houses might perhaps take us to board instead.
In front of a garage was a man with a blue coat and brass buttons, and “Fire Chief” on them. We asked him if he knew anyone at whose house we could stay until the road dried. He looked at us and then at the car in a quizzical sort of way.
“Oh, y-es,” he drawled. “You could put up at Mrs. Blake’s, I guess.”