His attention was fixed upon a map of the “Ideal Tour.” “The New England roads are very much better,” he said.
“But, you see, San Francisco is where I am going. Do you know which route is, if you prefer it, the least bad?”
“Oh, I see.” He looked sorry. “Of course if you must cross the continent, there is the Lincoln Highway!”
“Can you tell me how much work has been done on it—how much of it is finished? Might it not be better on account of the early season to take a Southern route? Isn’t there a road called the Santa Fé trail?”
“Why, yes, certainly,” said the nice young man. “The road goes through Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. It would be warmer assuredly.”
“How about the Arizona desert? Can we get across that?”
“That is the question!”
“Perhaps we had better just start out and ask the people living along the road which is the best way farther on?”
The young man brightened at once. “That would have been my suggestion from the beginning.”