“We can make it.”
“But look at the road!” I wailed. “It’s nothing but sand. We’ll slip back faster than we can go ahead.”
“Then we’ll walk backwards,” came the quick grin.
“Ten miles!” I suffered anew. “It’s no use, Poppy,” I waggled weakly, as a sort of climax to my little act. “I’m done for. Remember, kid, the jigsaw’s yours. And you’ll find my book of patterns and seven new blades under the dog house. Good-by, Poppy. You meant well in bringing me here. But you didn’t know, old pal. So I forgive you. And if you can’t make the jigsaw saw ask Dad to help you, for he’s almost as clever at sawing hunks out of his finger tips as I am.”
“I’ll ‘jigsaw’ you in the seat of the pants if you don’t come on and shut up,” he told me.
Seesawing together, the moon had been lifted into sight by the sinking sun. And now we could trace the winding course of the sandy road leading to New Zion. As I have hinted in an earlier paragraph, it was some road. Sand to the right of us, sand to the left of us and sand in front of us, as Lord Tennyson would have written it in poetry. But as I trudged along beside the leader I tried to grin and bear it.
“A light, Jerry!” he suddenly yipped. “There’s a farmhouse up ahead of us. We’re saved now, old kid.”
There was indeed a house up ahead of us, on the right-hand side of the road. We could see it in the moonlight. But as we hurried toward it, in livelier spirits, I couldn’t make myself believe that it was a farmhouse. Certainly, it was no ordinary farmhouse. For it was much too showy. I could count three stories and an attic. It was a stone house, too. And even if it had been built years and years ago, when labor and plaster were peddled around at bargain rates, I could not doubt that it had cost a fortune.
Who had been crazy enough, I wondered, curious over the unusual place, to build a house like this at the very end of the world? It didn’t fit into the waste landscape at all. Still, was my contented thought, the better the house the better the meal. It ought to work out that way. So we really were in luck to strike a place like this instead of a shack, which would have better matched the country.
Not only was the house itself built of stone, but it was inclosed by a stone wall at least three feet high. Where the private road turned in, smoothly graveled, the wall was lifted into a huge arched gateway. Looking in, I thought curious-like of the magic palace that the genii had built for Aladdin.