“France?” His eyes kindled as they swept the bare prairie,—“Believe me, I was glad to get back where there’s something doing. Mud,—that’s what France was,—nothin’ but mud!”
The tire he repaired gave out before evening, but we forgave him. Not every puncture can be patched by a hero of Belleau Wood. Besides, it was our twelfth that week, and one more or less had become a matter of indifference.
At Bismarck mine host met us at the sidewalk with, “Where’s the Mister?”
“There is no Mister,” answered Toby, to whom that question was a red rag. “We are alone.”
What he said next is memorable only because we were soon to hear it for the last time, and its refrain already had a pensive note of reminiscence. But that we dared go so far from home Misterless raised his opinion of us to dizzy heights, and after personally escorting us to the garage, where he made a eulogistic speech in which we figured as intimate friends for whom any service rendered would be a personal favor to him, he gave us the best room his house afforded. Though cozy it was not the best house in town. We had long avoided exclusive hotels. Hardened by ten thousand miles of vagabondage, we had become completely indifferent to appearances, and wore our grimy khaki and dusty boots with the greatest disregard of the opinion of others either had ever attained. While Toby packed each morning, it was my duty to attend to the car, and to this fact I could boast the trimmer appearance of the two. When the tank was filled, I usually sprayed what gasolene remained in the hose over my clothes where they looked worst, but Toby was so far sunk in lassitude that she scorned such primping. Her suit was a collection of souvenirs of delightful hours. A smudge on the left knee recalled where she rested her tin plate in the Canyon de Chelley. Down the front a stain showed where Hostein Chee had upset a cup of coffee. Her elbows were coated with a paste of grease and dirt from innumerable tires, and minor spots checkerboarded her from chin to knee. As a precaution, when we had to stay at a first class hotel, I usually left Toby outside while I registered. Though the clerk never looked favorably upon me, he would give me a room, usually on the fourteenth floor if they went that high. Then, before he could see Toby I would smuggle her hurriedly across to the elevator. Sometimes she refused to be hurried, but examined postcards and magazines on the way, indifferent to the amazed, immaculate eyes turned toward us.
“I always maintain,” she contended when I remonstrated with her, “that a person is well dressed if all her clothes are of the same sort, no matter what sort they are.”
“In that case,” I said, “you are undoubtedly well-dressed.”
Secure in this consciousness, Toby sat down in the lobby of our Bismarck hotel with two dozen postcards which she proceeded to address to her sisters and her cousins and her aunts. As she warmed to her work, she gradually spread out until the cards covered the desk. A fellow lodger watched her, and finally rose and stood beside her, curiosity gleaming from his eyes and reflecting in his gold teeth which glittered as he spoke.
“Say! If you’re going east”—he thrust a handful of business cards in her hands as he spoke—“maybe you’d just as lief distribute some of my cards with your own, as you go along.”
Something I recognized as Cantabrigian, but he did not, in Toby’s expression made him add propitiatingly, “Of course I’d expect to do the same for you. What’s your line,—postcards?”