The rain has finally stopped and this morning the sun is trying hard to shine. To do much good it will have to shine steadily for about three days. We walked to the end of the brick paving down one of the streets a little while ago and looked at the black wet Lincoln Highway leading to Sterling.
On our way back we met our friend the fire chief.
“Been to look at the mud?” asked he, cheerfully. “It isn’t a bit bad now. You ought to see it when it’s muddy! Why, it took me eight hours to go twenty-one miles! I did have to get a team of horses to pull me out of one bog, but otherwise I got through all right.”
“Didn’t you strain your engine?” I asked him. “Oh, yes,” he said cheerfully; “I guess I did, but I couldn’t help that.”
“Well, maybe you couldn’t,” I agreed, then added with confidential finality, “but I tell you what we’re going to do! We’re going to put ours on a nice, dry, comfortable freight car tomorrow morning and ship it past the mud district—which is probably the width of the continent.”
His warmth of manner fell suddenly to zero. I feared we had in some way offended him because we thought his state muddy. “Of course it is a lovely country to grow things in,” I added quickly, “but you see we want particularly to get to San Francisco, and the surest way is by freight.”
But we could not put the broken conversation together again. In fact, our friend the fire chief doesn’t smile any more. Our other friends, the garage men, also look at us askance—in fact in some way we seem to have lost our popularity.
CHAPTER XII
THE WEIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION
We know now what is the matter! They think we are quitters! They are so filled with a sense of shame for us that we are beginning to feel it ourselves. In spite of our original intention to go only so far as roads were good and accommodations were comfortable, we feel that we are somehow lacking in mettle, that we are sandless, to say the least!