As for those of us who haven't automobiles, life is pleasant and without responsibilities. We ride in every new automobile, and, what is more, we go over it as carefully as a farmer does a new horse. We open its hood and pry into its internal economy. We crank it to test its compression—half the Homeburg men who have achieved broken wrists by the crank route haven't autos at all. We denounce the owner's judgment on oils and take his machine violently away from him in order to prove that it will pull better uphill with the spark retarded. At night, during the summer, we hurry through supper and then go out on the front porch to wait for a chance to act as ballast.
No automobile owner in the dirt roads belt will go out without a full tonneau if he can help it—makes riding easier—and this means permanent employment during the evenings for about three hundred friends all summer long. In fact the demand for ballast is often greater than the supply. As a result, we have become hideously spoiled. I have passed up as many as six automobiles in an evening on various captious pretexts, waiting all the time for Sim Bone's car, whose tonneau is long and exactly fits my legs. Once or twice Sim has failed to come around after I have waved the rest of the procession by, and we have had to stay at home. I have spoken to him severely about this, and he is more careful now.
Because of our great interest in automobiles, vicarious or otherwise, there is no class-hatred in Homeburg. If a man were to stop by the roadside and begin to denounce the automobile as an oppressor of the pedestrian, he would in all probability be kidnaped by some acquaintance before he was half through and carried forty miles away for company's sake. About the only Homeburg resident who doesn't ride is old Auntie Morley, who broke her leg in a bobsled sixty years ago and has had a holy horror of speed ever since.
In fact the only classes we have are the privileged class who merely ride in automobiles and the oppressed class who ride and have to pay for them, too. Lately the latter class has begun to feel itself abused and has been grumbling a little, but we overlook it. No appeal to prejudice and jealousy can move us. Of course, I don't think that an automobile owner should be expected to leave his wife at home in order to accommodate his neighbors, and there may be some just complaint when an owner is called up late at night and asked to haul friends home from a party to which he hasn't been invited. But on the whole the automobile owners are very well treated. Suppose we spectators should band together and refuse to ride in the things or talk about them! The market would be glutted with second-hand cars in a month.
We have no trouble with the speed limit in Homeburg either. This may be due partly to our good sense, but it is mostly due to our peculiar crossings. Homeburg is paved with rich black dirt, and in order to keep the populace out of the bosom of the soil in the muddy seasons, the brick crossings are built high and solid, forming a series of impregnable "thank-ye-marms" all over the town. One of our great diversions during the tourist season is to watch the reckless strangers from some other State dash madly into town at forty miles an hour and hit the crossing at the head of Main Street. There is a crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top. There is another crash and more screams at the other side of the street, and before the driver has diagnosed the case, he has hit the Exchange Street crossing, which sticks out like the Reef of Norman's Woe. When he has landed on the other side of this crossing, he slows down and goes meekly out of town at ten miles an hour, while we saunter forth and pick up small objects of value such as wrenches, luncheon baskets, hairpins, hats, and passengers.
Last summer we picked up an oldish man who had been thrown out of an unusually jambangsome touring car. He had been traveling in the tonneau alone, and even before he met our town he had not been enjoying himself. The driver and his accomplice had not noticed their loss, and when we had brushed off and restored the old gentleman, he said "Thank God!" and went firmly over to the depot, where he took the next train for home, leaving no word behind in case his friends should return—which they did that afternoon and searched mournfully at a snail's pace for over twenty miles on both sides of our town.
Since the automobile has begun to rage in our midst, the garage is the center of our city life. The machine owners stop each day for lubricating oil and news and conversation; the non-owners stroll over to inspect the visiting cars and give advice when necessary; and the loafers have abandoned the implement store, Emerson's restaurant, and the back of McMuggins' drug store in favor of the garage, because they find about seven times as much there to talk about. The city garage can't compare with ours for adventure and news. I have spent a few hours in your most prominent car-nurseries and I haven't heard anything but profanity on the part of the owners and Broadway talk among the chauffeurs.
In the country it's different. Take a busy day at Gayley's, for instance. It usually opens about three a.m., when Gayley crawls out of bed in response to a cataract of woe over the telephone and goes out nine miles hither or yon to haul in some foundered brother. Gayley has a soft heart and is always going out over the country at night to reason with some erring engine; but since last April first, when he traveled six miles at two a.m. in response to a call and found a toy automobile lying bottom-side up in the road, he has become suspicious and embittered, and has raised his prices.
At six a.m. Worley Gates, who farms eight miles south, comes in to catch an early train and delivers the first bulletin. The roads to the south are drying fast, but he went down the clay hill sidewise and had to go through the bottom on low. At seven, Wimble Horn and Colonel Ackley and Sim Bone drop in while waiting for breakfast. Bone thinks he'll drive to Millford, but doesn't think he can get in an hour's business and get back by noon.
This starts the first debate of the day, Colonel Ackley contending that he has done the distance easily in an hour-ten, and Sim being frankly incredulous. Experts decide that it can be done with good roads. Colonel says he can do it in mud and can take the hills on high; says he never goes into low for anything. Bill Elwin, one of our gasless experts, reminds him of the time he couldn't get up Foster's Hill on second and was passed by three automobiles and fourteen road roaches. This is a distinct breach of etiquette on Bill's part, for he was riding with Colonel at the time and should have upheld him. The discussion is just getting good when Ackley's wife calls him home to breakfast over the 'phone, and the first tourist of the day comes in.