He relieved Mrs. Bugbee of her two hand-bags and led the way to a bespattered flivver which crouched apprehensively in a maze of frozen wheel tracks behind the shuttered building, Mr. Bugbee following with a heavy suitcase in either hand and a blanket-roll swung over his shoulder by its strap.
“Likely you’ll be a mite crowded, but that’s your own fault, fetchin’ so much dunnage with you,” stated their guide. “You two had better ride in the back there and hold a couple of them biggest grips on your laps. I guess I kin wedge the rest of it into the front seat alongside of me. All set?” he asked. “Let’s move then.”
The car slewed on its tires, then settled deeply into the frozen ruts, jouncing and jerking.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier traveling with a sleigh?” inquired Mr. Bugbee, speaking rather brokenly between jolts.
“Don’t do much sleddin’ in this country any more—not till later, anyway, when the weather gits set,” vouchsafed Mr. Talbot. “A thaw’s liable to come and then where would you be with your sled runners? Besides, purty near ever’body up here keeps an ottermobile. Set tight!” he commanded. “We’re about to hit a rough place.”
But by the time he had uttered his warning they had hit it.
“Yes, indeed,” went on Mr. Talbot, “ottermobiles is come into quite general use. You folks ever been here before? Yes? Then prob’ly you remember the old Turnbull Tavern that used to stand at the forks over to the Cove? Well, it’s gone. Tore it away to put up a fillin’ station. We got two fillin’ stations—that one and one other one—and they’s talk of a third one in the spring.”
Above the obstruction of a suitcase which he balanced precariously upon his knees, Mr. Bugbee peered across a landscape which so far as the immediate foreground was concerned mainly consisted of vistas and aisles of stumps, with puddles of ice and spindly evergreens interspersed and a final garnishing of slashed-off faded limbs.
“My recollection is that the wilderness used to come right down to the tracks,” he said.