The mountain pass between New Mexico and Colorado was beautiful, too, and exciting. In places it was a shelf shoved against the mountain, and Jimmie said it tickled his stomach to look down on the tops of other automobiles, traveling the loop of road below them. Even Carrie, riding haughtily in her trailer, let out an anguished bleat when she hung on the very edge of a curve. And the Reo groaned and puffed.
Up through Colorado they chugged; past Pike's Peak; through Denver, flat on the plain with a blue mountain wall to its west; on through the farmlands north of it to the sugar-beet town which was their goal.
Beyond the town stood an adobe village for beetworkers on the Lukes fields, where the Beechams were to work.
"Mud houses," Dick exclaimed, crumbling off a piece of mud plaster thick with straw.
"Like the bricks the Israelites made in Egypt," said Grandpa; "only Pharaoh wanted them to do without the straw."
"It's a Mexican village," observed Grandma. "I'd feel like a cat in a strange garret here. And not a smidgin of shade. That shack off there under the cottonwood tree looks cooler."
"It's a chicken-coop!" squealed Rose-Ellen as they walked over to it. "Gramma wants to live in a chicken-coop!"
"It's empty. And it'd be a sight easier to clean than some places where humans have lived," Grandma replied stoutly.
So the Beechams got permission to live in the farmer's old chicken-coop. It had two rooms, and the men pitched the tent beside it for a bedroom. They had time to set up "chicken-housekeeping," as Rose-Ellen called it, before the last of May, when beet work began. They made a pretty cheerful place of this new home; though, of course, it had no floor and no window glass, and sun and stars shone in through its roof, and the only running water was in the irrigation ditch. Even under the glistening cottonwood tree it was a stifling cage on a hot day.
They were all going to work, except Jimmie and Sally. It would take all of them, new hands that they were, to care for the twenty acres they were to work. Mr. Lukes said that children under sixteen were not supposed to be employed, but of course they could always help their parents. Daddy said that was one way to get around the Child Labor Law.