“Don’t stint your speed on account of me,” said Donald. “I am just itching to know what Kitty can do.”
“All right, here’s your chance,” said Linda. “Hear her purr?”
She settled her body a trifle tensely, squared her shoulders, and gripped the steering wheel. Then she increased the gas and let the Bear-cat roll over the smooth road from Lilac Valley running south into Los Angeles. At a speed that was near to flying as a non-professional attains, the youngsters traveled that road. Their eyes were shining; their blood was racing. Until the point where rougher roads and approaching traffic forced them to go slower, they raced, and when they slowed down they looked at each other and laughed in morning delight.
“I may not be very wise,” said Linda, “but didn’t I do the smartest thing when I let Eileen have the touring car and saved the Bear-cat for us?”
“Nothing short of inspiration,” said Donald. “The height of my ambition is to own a Bear-cat. If Father makes any mention of anything I would like particularly to have for a graduation present, I am cocked and primed as to what I shall tell him.”
“You’d better save yourself a disappointment,” said Linda soberly. “You will be starting to college this fall, and when you do you will be gone nine months out of the year, and I am fairly sure your father wouldn’t think shipping a Bear-cat back and forth a good investment, or furnishing you one to take to school with you. He would fear you would never make a grade that would be a credit to him if he did.”
“My!” laughed Donald, “you’ve got a long head on your shoulders!”
“When you’re thrown on your own for four of the longest, lonesomest years of your life, you learn to think,” said Linda soberly.
She was touching the beginning of Los Angeles traffic. Later she was on the open road again. The mists were thinning and lifting. The perfume was not so heavy. The sheeted whiteness of the orange groves was broken with the paler white of plum merging imperceptibly into the delicate pink of apricot and the stronger pink of peach, and there were deep green orchards of smooth waxen olive foliage and the lacy-leaved walnuts. Then came the citrus orchards again, and all the way on either hand running with them were almost uninterrupted miles of roses of every colour and kind, and everywhere homes ranging from friendly mansions, all written over in adorable flower colour with the happy invitation “Come in and make yourself at home,” to tiny bungalows along the wayside crying welcome to this gay pair of youngsters in greetings fashioned from white and purple wisteria, gold bignonia, every rose the world knows, and myriad brilliant annual and perennial flower faces gathered from the circumference of the tropical globe and homing enthusiastically on the King’s Highway. Sometimes Linda lifted her hand from the wheel to wave a passing salute to a particularly appealing flower picture. Sometimes she whistled a note or cried a greeting to a mocking bird, a rosy finch, or a song sparrow.
“Look at the pie timber!” she cried to Donald, calling his attention to a lawn almost covered with red-winged blackbirds. “Four hundred and twenty might be baked in that pie,” she laughed.