Now, it is a curious psychological fact that when a robust authoritative-looking man gives an order with the air of one used to commanding, ninety-nine per cent of the people to whom he gives his orders will hasten to obey without pausing to question his authority. The chauffeur threw in his clutch and the car glided away, while Bob McGraw, glancing back, saw T. Morgan Carey and a uniformed, watchman dashing down the capitol steps.
They were too late. T. Morgan Carey shouted to his chauffeur, but it was not a day of silent motors, and legislation affecting muffler cut-outs was still in the dim and distant Not-Yet.
The car sped out of the capitol grounds and away into the heart of the city. Presently the houses grew more scattered, the traffic dwindled and the car leaped forward at a forty-mile-an-hour clip. They swung down a wide road that stretched south into the sunny San Joaquin, and the mellow piping of meadow larks and linnets came pleasantly in Mr. McGraw's ears; the pungent aroma of tar-weed, the thousand and one little smells of the wide free spaces that he loved floated across to him from the fields on each side of the road, as he sat erect in the tonneau and sniffed the air of freedom.
He had had his fill of cities and he was glad to leave them behind.
CHAPTER XIII
The second event in Donna Corblay's life was about to be consummated. For the first time since her arrival in San Pasqual, a babe in arms, she was about to leave it!
All of her uneventful colorless mediocre life Donna had felt a passionate longing to go up into the country on the other side of the range. To her, the long strings of passenger coaches came to San Pasqual as the heralds of another world—poignant pulsations of the greater life beyond the sky-line, and not as the tools of a whimsical circumstance, bringing to Donna a daily consignment of hats. From earliest childhood she had watched the trains disappearing into Tehachapi Pass, tracing their progress northward long after they had disappeared by the smoke wafted over the crest of the bare volcanic range; until with the passage of many trains and many years the desire to see what lay beyond that grim barrier had developed into an obsession. Because of the purple distances that mocked her, the land of sunshine, fruit and flowers was doubly alluring; her desire was as that of a soul that dwells in limbo and longs for the smile of God.
And to-day she was going out into the world, for this was her wedding day. She had received Bob's telegram, asking her to meet him in Bakersfield, and she was going to meet him; alternately she laughed and wept, for the transcendent joy of two Events in one short day had filled her heart to overflowing, leaving no room for vague forebodings of the future.