Six o'clock would blow shortly from a hundred sirens; and the thrill of "quittin'-time" could already be discerned in the air. Down the street from the direction of the big transcontinental depot came a 'bus, three or four blocks away; and Daisy, with a habit of the countryside, identified this vehicle instantly by the team, whose markings she had instinctively remembered. It was the Imperial Hotel rig, returning from the station. No time, therefore, was to be lost, if she was to evade her self-appointed guardian, old Jim Hogle.
A rank of jitneys was parked along the curb. Daisy approached a driver with a mop of black curly hair so abundant that it pushed his cap to one side. This driver half-turned his head in a formal "straight business, and don't waste my time" way; but the corners of mouth and eye twinkled companionably and humorously.
"Could you", Daisy's eyes twinkled back, too, in spite of her trace of country-girl diffidence, "could you—"
"I should say I could," the chauffeur's face was expressionless, but his accent was merry.
"Could you", Daisy dimpled as she went on, "take me to here—see?"
The young man hitched his chin forward in ostentatious scrutiny. Then, in a matter-of-course way, he took the scrap of paper from Daisy's fingers, brought it to his lips, handed it back, clicked open the tonneau door, and motioned inward with hospitable palm.
"Thank a-you," he said, elaborately, as Daisy stepped in; then, without opening the fore-door, he vaulted into his own seat. There was the usual preliminary roar, proceeding by staccato jet and pit-a-pat to smooth pulsing motion, as the jitney glided out handily into the multifarious traffic of the street.
No river-ravine of Wheat-Land on a June Sunday had ever stirred Daisy Nixon to an atom of the ecstasy that champagned her as she sailed down that traffic-current between its Saguenay-banks of masonry, whose uneven summits, high above her, scissored the blue silk of the sky. Forward, upward to right, upward to left, the girl's glance travelled; then came down to the sidewalk, no square yard of which escaped for one clear moment from servitude to the thousand thousand tramping feet, following at a slower pace the drift of the traffic in the hundred-foot driving way.
No electric welcome blazed from the front of the city hall, with its coal-darkened brickwork and broad steps. No welcome, nor any sound but a mighty hammer-stroke from the tall clock, telling Daisy that Time was moving as well as she. No welcome—but Daisy Nixon felt that there could not help be a quickening of the city's pulse at the notability of this day, with its every moment so rare and thrilling to her.
The pulse of the motor throbbed as, coursing in the pack of its kind, it nosed from side to side or held a true-running swift pace astride a tram-rail. The chauffeur, with an air of profound abstraction made comical by his tilted cap and sportive half-presented profile, gave "her" spark or "juice" as the occasion demanded, with a casual motion of his gloved thumb. At a corner where two broad streets met, the taxi-cab turned aside. Proceeding a little way down the second main artery of traffic, it rounded a corner under a brass-grilled jeweler's window and entered a labyrinth of side-streets in which Daisy soon lost her sense of direction so completely that the sun, after what seemed like an excursion into the little-visited due-north sector of the horizon, appeared to move around to the east, and forthwith to commence another day without pausing for the customary night-interval.