“We are, if we go at all,” said his uncle.
“Hooray! I never rode horseback!”
“You’ll have plenty of chance to learn, then,” Uncle Billy smiled. “About the first night, you’ll wish you hadn’t tried to learn, too.”
“Bet I won’t!” Bennie retorted. “How far is it to Bend?”
“Oh, a hundred miles, I guess. Maybe more.”
“Seven-thirty now—twenty-five miles an hour, that means we get there at noon.”
“You are my idea of an optimist, Bennie,” said the doctor. “This is an eastern Oregon road we are going to travel on. If we should travel twenty-five miles an hour, we wouldn’t get there at all.”
For many miles, the road out of the park took them in a southerly direction, down the Anna Creek valley, through a noble forest of yellow pines, a tree the boys had never seen before, which has great flat scales of bark which looks almost like copper, and past the deep cañon the creek has cut in the lava, with sides fantastically carved into giant columns. Finally, they reached the gate of the park, were checked up by the gateman, and went on, swinging eastward now.
Bennie, as soon as they were off the government road, very soon realized why they wouldn’t make Bend at noon. In eastern Oregon, a country “dirt” road, which in the East is usually quite decent in summer isn’t a dirt road at all, really, because there isn’t any dirt. All the soil is powdered volcanic ash and pumice, no doubt deposited there by Mount Mazama ages ago. This volcanic soil looks almost gray-white in color, and a road made on it, without any macadam, is very quickly pounded, in dry weather, into a layer of dust inches thick, which rises like a smoke screen behind the car, and gets kicked out of holes in the road by the passing tires till the holes deepen more and more, making the road one endless series of bumps.
Instead of traveling at twenty-five miles an hour, the doctor held the car down to fifteen, and very often had to go slower than that.