"My featherbeds!" cried Grandma, weeping for once.
Hurriedly she sold the beds for a dollar to her next-door neighbor. The clock she would not leave and it took turns with the baby sitting on grown-up laps.
At each stop the springless truck seats were crowded tighter with people, till there was hardly room for the passengers' feet. The crowding did help warm the unheated truck; but Grandma's face grew gray with pain as cold and cramp made her "rheumatiz tune up."
And there was no place at all to take care of a baby.
When they had traveled two hours they wondered how they could bear thirteen hundred miles, cold, aching, wedged motionless. All they could look forward to was lunchtime, when they could stretch themselves and ease their gnawing stomachs; but the sun climbed high and the truck still banged along without stopping.
The children could hear a man in front angrily asking the driver, "When we get-it--the dinner?"
The driver faced ahead as if he were deaf.
"When we get-it--the grub?" roared the man, pounding the driver's shoulder.
"If we stop once an hour, we don't get there in time for your jobs," the driver growled, and drove on.
Not till dark did they stop to eat. Grandpa, clambering down stiffly, had to lift Grandma and Sally out. Daddy took Jimmie, sobbing with weariness. Dick and Rose-Ellen tumbled out, feet asleep and bodies aching. When they stumbled into the roadside hamburger stand, the lights blurred before their eyes, and the hot steamy air with its cooking smells made Rose-Ellen so dizzy that she could hardly eat the hamburger and potato chips and coffee slammed down before her on the sloppy counter. Jimmie went to sleep with his head in his plate and had to be wakened to finish.