“I wish we could,” Uncle Billy answered. “But while we’re getting hard and healthy, a lot of folks up in Portland are getting sick, so you see I have to be back. Hustle along, boys. No time to lose!”
It was so early that they had to get breakfast at an all-night lunch room, where Bennie bought some meat scraps for Jeff, who was still on the job. He had slept in the car that night.
“Good gracious, are you really going to take that mutt back with you?” his uncle demanded. “All the way East?”
“You’ve said it. Why, I bet he’d follow the train, if I didn’t take him. He appreciates me at my true value, this blooded collie does, don’t you, Jeff, old thing?”
Jeff responded by leaping up and licking his face.
They were off at six, and rode all day northward through the “desert” country, sometimes down in the bottom of bare, desolate looking cañons, sometimes up on the plateau where nothing but endless miles of sage brush lay between them and the Cascades. In the morning Jefferson was the nearest mountain, and they could see the whole eastern face, snow-white and precipitous, with the summit pinnacle looking from this distance like a tiny little white button on top. Later they had to descend by a long, winding road cut out of the bank, without any guard rails, into the Deschutes Cañon, across the river on a bridge, and climb out on the other side. As afternoon came on, Jefferson dropped behind them, and Mount Hood grew nearer, 11,225 feet of snow, shaped like an almost perfect pyramid.
Again they descended into a cañon, and climbed out of it for six miles by a road so steep that they had to keep in low speed all the way, so narrow Bennie prayed they wouldn’t meet anybody, and without any sign of a guard rail, or fence, or wall, to keep a car from skidding off into the hole below.
“Say, if I drove a car out here much, I’d have nervous prostration,” Spider said, as Uncle Billy crawled past a descending Ford, with his right wheels about eight inches from the rim of the cañon.
“And if I had to drive down Fifth Avenue, I’d probably have it,” the doctor laughed.
The sun was setting as they finally came into a region of orchards and endless grain fields, hit a good road, and whizzed rapidly down hill, steeper and steeper, into the gorge of the Columbia River, and ran right into a thriving, lively town called The Dalles.