“One of your milk-cans.”
“They’re all fuller melk.”
“I’ll buy one, milk and all.”
“Wa-all, I reckon I’ll hev to oblige you.”
“Here’s five dollars on account. There’ll be five more when you get back.”
“Wa-all, all ri-ight. Get along there, Jawn Henry.”
John Henry got along. Even his cloppety-clop did not waken Miss Webling.
The return of the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke 115 in confusion, finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three strange men at work outside.
When the tank was filled, Davidge entered her compartment with a cheery “Good morning,” and slammed the door after him. The gasolene, like the breath of a god, gave life to the dead. The car snarled and jumped, and went roaring across the bridge, up the hill and down another, and down that and up another.
Here they caught, through a frame of leaves, a glimpse of Washington in the sunrise, a great congregation of marble temples and trees and sky-colored waters, the shaft of the Monument lighted with the milky radiance of a mountain peak on its upper half, the lower part still dusk with valley shadow, and across the plateau of roofs the solemn Capitol in as mythical a splendor as the stately dome that Kubla Khan decreed in Xanadu.