“I’ve made my will, and I hope my callin’ an’ election’s sure,” said Walky gravely. “I never did expect to travel faster’n the cannon-ball express on the Vermont Central; I went to Montpelier once. But go ahead. If we’re wrecked, it’ll be in the cause of progress, and I snum! nobody can’t say that Walkworthy Dexter ain’t as up-an’-comin’ as the next man in Polktown.”
Janice started the engine and the automobile turned into the Upper Road. There were not many houses here, and she speeded up to about twenty miles an hour right at the start. Walky gasped, grabbed a hand-hold with one huge, hairy hand, and clapped the other on his hat.
As the car chugged along his grin expanded slowly but surely, until Janice was half afraid that his ears would disappear entirely. When they shot past Elder Concannon’s house the old minister was out in his yard. Walky wanted to say something, but he had lost his voice. The Elder scowled after the flying car, which was out of sight in half a minute.
The Kremlin ran easily and prettily, and not until they had gone ten miles or more did Janice slow down and turn the machine about.
“Well!” sighed Walky. “I ain’t felt jest that way since I was swung too high at the Lakeside Picnic Grounds when the Union Sunday School went there on a picnic the year I was married—and that’s longer ago than I wanter tell ye, Janice. What do one o’ these things cost? I dunno but I’ll git me a gasoline truck and sell old Josephus and his mate. Nothin’ like keepin’ up with the times.”
Janice felt herself to be a good enough driver now to venture almost anywhere with the car. Frank Bowman’s work had begun and he was busy on the railroad survey all day long. Marty went to work for him as he had promised, and labored twice as hard as he would have been obliged to work at home. He started off early in the morning with his dinner-pail and returned in the evening with a tired but happy face.
“Makes a feller feel like he was somebody,” he confided to Janice. And when, at the end of the week, he brought home nine dollars—all silver “cartwheels”—and dropped them one by one into his mother’s lap, Aunt ’Mira wept for pleasure.
“Does seem just too good to be true, Janice,” she said to her niece, “Marty steadying down this way. And he never had an idee that amounted to nothin’ in his head afore you come to us.”
“He was too young then to think about work,” Janice said.
“Ya-as, mebbe. But I know who to thank,” said the large woman, giving her niece a bearlike hug. “You don’t know what it means to a mother to see she’s raised a son to an age where he’s something besides an expense and a nuisance. If anything should happen to his father—God forbid!—I feel now as though Marty would be somethin’ more’n a willer-reed to lean onto.”