"Well," said the burgess, and thought. Might as well save climbing all the way up West Street—and you couldn't brush off a man who was trying to do you a favor, just because you thought he stank. "Obliged," he said. "If you'll drop me at my house I'll pick up my own car."
He waited with Mrs. Chesbro while her husband dashed through the rain. She didn't talk, which the burgess approved, and once when he met her eye she gave him a tired smile. The burgess judged that she was onto her husband, and seldom had anything to smile about.
For that matter, what did anyone have to smile about? The burgess looked over his borough and hardly heard Artie Chesbro chattering beside him. The street lamps at the bottom of West Street were out. One of the big elms that framed the post office was trailing a pair of enormous branches, broken-winged, across the street; they had to detour far to the left to pass it. Well, there wouldn't be much traffic tonight—and you couldn't tell, maybe he'd be lucky and the whole tree would have to come down; and then they could get on with widening West Street and the hell with the Garden Club.
They went up over the West Street hill and down the other side. "—don't know if you've considered the importance of warehousing facilities in attracting industry," Chesbro was saying in his ear. "War plants? Sure. They're a dime a dozen, Henry, and they come and fold up and then where are you? But you take a town that's got a reputation for good, low-cost—"
The burgess felt entirely too surrounded by Chesbros, with Artie babbling on one side and the wife, silent on the other. Then they turned into Sycamore. The burgess leaned forward. Funny, he could hardly see the highway junction at the bottom of the hill. They rolled down at forty or so, and then everything happened at once. Something jumped up out of the pavement ahead of them. "Watch out!" yelled the burgess. "Jesus!" cried Artie Chesbro, slamming on the brakes and skidding. It looked like a figure, some crazy kind of figure hard to make out in the rain, that suddenly started to get up in the middle of the road; it humped itself and flopped back, and then leaped high in the air, higher than the roof of the car.
Mrs. Chesbro laughed out loud, nervously.
"Busted water pipe!" cried Artie Chesbro. "Look, Henry, it's a whole fountain!"
It was a fountain, all right, but it wasn't anything broken. The burgess swallowed hard. Not in '35, not even in '39, had the storm sewers backed up hard enough and fast enough to send their manhole lids flying into the air.