“What was it?” says I, letting out my neck at the smoking car. “A bomb?”
“Carburetor trouble,” says old monkey wrench, jabbing as unconcerned as you please at something or other with a screwdriver.
So far in this chapter I haven’t said more than a mouthful or two about the old junk-pile that we were escorting around. Nor have I said anything to speak of about the road over which we were traveling, or the general lay of the country. As a matter of fact, in carrying on our gab, as I have written it down, we didn’t “say” this and that—we yelled it. We had to in order to get our words into the other’s ears. But I thought it might get kind of tiresome to you to have us yelling back and forth like a couple of loud speakers. So I wrote it down the other way—as though we were carrying on a very polite parlor conversation.
As for the road, if you can imagine a pair of wheel ruts across the most forsaken part of the Sahara Desert, that’s the kind of stuff we had to travel over. Sand, sand and nothing but sand. The only place where it wasn’t deep was where it was deeper. It’s a wonder the old car navigated the road at all. And I didn’t blame it now for wanting to lay down and rest—only I could have saved some skin on my nose if it hadn’t used its sneezer on me. That was kind of unfair, I thought. For I hadn’t picked on it.
As I have explained in an earlier chapter, this side road was a sort of forgotten connecting link between C. H. O., the highway that was closed, and C. H. P., the other east-and-west highway on the south side of the river. According to our map there was a burg up ahead of us by the name of New Zion, a community of “religious fanatics,” according to Ma Doanes’ line, and it was here that we were to cross the river. Two more miles of soft road beyond the river and then we would strike Neponset Corners, the town that Lawyer Chew owned—only it wasn’t as big as he was—two hundred population, I think. Yah, you can see now how he came to be mayor and everything. All the voters owed him money, and whether they wanted to vote for him or not they didn’t dare do otherwise.
Well, to pick up my story, I bravely got back in my seat when Poppy hung up the screwdriver and crowbar. Then away we went again ... almost!
“What’s the matter now?” says I, necking through the brass windshield frame to see where the engine had gone to.
“I killed it,” confessed the chauffeur.
“Well,” says I, ready to overlook the crime, “it deserved it. But you might have waited until we got home. For this is an awfully hot place to hold a funeral.”
“Get out and wind ’er up, you bag of nonsense, and shut up.”