The tire changing went very quickly, and in a few minutes we were on the road again. Celia and I ate our luncheon, but E. M., struggling with the zigzagging car, had no thought for food and ate only a mouthful or two that I fed him as he drove. It was by now pouring hard and we seemed to be making less and less progress. One thing, we now quite understood what our friend the fire chief meant when he said the road around Rochelle was only a little muddy. Without hesitating a moment we would be willing to swear that the mud championship of the world belongs to Iowa. Illinois mud is slippery and slyly eager to push unstable tourists into the ditch, but in Iowa it lurks in unfathomable treachery, loath to let anything ever get out again that once ventures into it. Our progress through it became hideously like that of a fly crawling through yellow flypaper—as though it were a question of time how soon we would be brought to an exhausted end, and sink into it forever!
At the end of two hours more, we had gone ten miles. Cedar Rapids was still nearly twenty miles away. Twenty miles! Could anyone in a lifetime go so far as that? Could any machine hold out so endlessly? In another hour we had gone only four miles further, and by no means sure of our road, and then came a third puncture! It was one of those last straws that seem to finish everything. You think you just can’t live through it and struggle more. Much better give up and lie down in the fly-paper and stay there. We were at the top of a fairly steep hill, so that we might perhaps be able to go on again, but to see E. M., already exhausted, and not a soul to help him, get out again into that drenching rain—he had no raincoat and the mud was over his shoetops—and we had started on the trip in the first place because he had been ill—I could easily have burst into tears. Which exhibition of courage would have helped the situation such a lot!
Hours and Hours, Across Land as Flat and Endless as the Ocean
Meanwhile he was having a hopeless time trying to jack the car up. There was no foundation for the jack to stand on, so that it merely burrowed down into the clay. Some men lounged out of the one house near by. They were Germans. All the inhabitants seemed to be German. They approached with seeming friendliness, but on closer inspection of us, their demeanor noticeably changed. There was something in our appearance they did not like. I thought possibly they resented our car’s waltzing, or thought that E. M.’s jack was harmfully puncturing the surface of their beautiful road. Two of them shrugged their shoulders and all of them looked at us in impassive silence that was neither friendly nor polite. Then a younger man appeared who came forward as though to offer to help, but stopping to look inquisitively at the radiator top, he too, grew sullen. And then we understood! The emblem of the Royal Automobile Club of London was put on when we were in England last year; and as it is very pretty, we happen never to have taken it off, and the men were Germans! That’s why they wouldn’t help us. We had asked for a piece of plank that one of them was holding; the man carried it away. Finally, when that dreadful tire was at last on, they would not even tell us the way until I asked in German. Then one of them laconically pointed it out.
Hot, tired, and soaked as a drowned rat, E. M. for three and a half hours longer guided the steaming, floundering and irresponsible machine until at last by supreme effort he got us to Cedar Rapids.
CHAPTER XIV
ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS
Somewhere we read a sign “Cedar Rapids suits me. It will suit you.” Of course after those last six hours of mud-wallowing agony C-e-d-a-r R-a-p-i-d-s simply spelled Heaven. But after we were dry and warm and fed—such is the ingratitude of human nature and tourists—we would very gladly have gone away again.
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,