We worked half an hour jacking up the car. No sooner had we got it where it should be, than the car’s weight sank it in the mud, and we had to begin again our snail process. To my delight, Toby was fascinated by the thing, and from that hour claimed it as her own. We mutually divided the labor as our tastes and talents dictated. It seemed that Toby revelled in handling tools, which dropped from my inept grasp, while my sense of mechanics and experience surpassed hers. I was to be the diagnostician, she the surgeon. In other words, I bossed the job, while she did the work.
While Toby struggled with the jack a Mexican on a flea-bitten cayuse slouched on the horizon. He was black and hairy, and one “six-gun” in his teeth would have signed his portrait as Captain of the Bandits. I stopped him and asked him to lend us his brute strength, which he smilingly did, pleased as a child at being initiated into the sacred mysteries of motoring. When I allowed him to propel the socket-wrench his cup ran over. He did everything backward, but he furnished horse-sense, which we lacked, and when we attempted to lift heavy weights, he courteously supplanted us. The three of us invented a lingua franca in Mexican, Italian, French and musical terms.
“Tire,—avanti!” Gesture of lifting. Groan,—signifying great weight.
“Troppo,—troppo! Largo, largo! Ne faites pas ça! Ah-h, si, si,—bono hombre, multo, multo bono hombre!”
Thus encouraged, he worked willingly and faithfully, and at the end of a half hour’s toil, waved aside our thanks, untied his weary cayuse, and raised his sombrero. He had not robbed us nor beaten us, but had acted as one Christian to another. I ran after him saying fluently, as if I had known the language all my life, “Multo, multo, beaucoup bono hombre.” He showed his brilliant teeth. I offered him money, which he at first refused. “Bono hombre,” I insisted, “Cigarettos!” And so he took it, much pleased. He thoroughly enjoyed the episode. I hope his boss did, when he arrived an hour late. Toby enjoyed the episode, too, and persisted in sending home postcards, on which she spoke of being rescued by a Mexican bandit.
During the morning several little towns,—all alike, flitted by us,—Sabinal, Hondo, Dunlay. At Hondo, where the mud was thickest, we stopped at a little general store for lunch. The proprietor, a tall, vague man, discussed earnestly, as one connoisseur to another, the merits of the various tinned goods he submitted, and after a leisurely chat and several purchases, in which the matter of trade became secondary, he urged on us several painted sticks of candy, a new kind which he said he enjoyed sucking during his solitary guard at the store. After the customary, “You’re a long ways from home,” he bade us goodbye, hopefully but sadly, as one would a consumptive great-aunt about to take a trip to the North Pole, and watched us bump out of sight.
We had twenty miles of such luxuriant mud that we stopped to photograph it. It is only slight exaggeration to say that the ruts came to the camera’s level. Then we forded the Neuces River, a stream woven into early Texan history, and began to climb out of the land of cotton into the grazing country. The herds and herds of sheep and white angora goats we now encountered made a charming landscape but an irritating episode. A large flock of silly sheep rambled halfway to our car, then, frightened, fled in the other direction, turning again with those they met, who also faced and fled, baa-ing; no militia could clear the traffic they disorganized. Each herd we met meant a wasted half hour. Their herders sat their horses in grim patience, with the infinite contempt shepherds get for their charges and for life in general. Out here, “being the goat” takes a new and dignified meaning—for a goat is placed with each hundred sheep to steer the brainless mass, act as leaders in danger, and furnish the one brain of the herd.
These pastoral happenings delayed us, until toward night we climbed dark dunes into a clear golden sunset. Through a gate we entered what seemed to be a cattle track through a large ranch, but was in fact the main highway to El Paso. The roads in this part of the country cut through large holdings, and the pestiferous cattle gate begins to bar the road, necessitating stopping, crossing, shutting the gate again, several times a mile. And let me warn the traveling Easterner that not to leave a gate as you find it is in truth a crime against hospitality, for one is often on private property.
Queer blunt mesas rose on all sides of us, and when dark came upon us we had entered a small canyon, and were winding to the top and down again out of the hills. The cattlegates and rocky road made going slow, and as Venus, frosty and brilliant, came out, we were imprisoned in this weirdly gloomy spot, on the top of the world. A quaver in Toby’s usually stalwart voice made me wonder if she were remembering her mother’s last words,—“Don’t drive at night.” This is no reflection on Toby’s staunchness; the immensity of the West, after dark, when first it looms above one used to the coziness of ordered streets, must always seem portentous and awful. We hastened on, winding down through one enchanting glade after another, till we met the highway again. Toby took the wheel, and we hummed along. Suddenly a stone struck the engine, and a deafening roar like that of an express train frightened us. Something vital, by its clatter, had been shattered, and we again faced the possibility of delay and frustration—even retreat. We got out and searched for the trouble. Luckily we had that day unpacked our flash-light, for Venus, though she looked near enough to pick out of the sky, furnished poor illumination for engine troubles. Search revealed an important looking pipe beneath the car broken in two, with a jagged fracture. Should we chance driving on, or camp till morning?
We were tired and our pick-up lunch of deviled ham and crackers seemed long ago. After a hard day’s run, the difficulties of making camp in the dark, with our equipment still unpacked, and going cold and supperless to bed loomed large. Besides, there could not have been worse camping ground in the world. Soggy cotton fields under water on both sides gave us the choice of sleeping in the middle of the road or on the back seat piled high with baggage. The engine, though roaring like a wounded lioness, still ran steadily. I knew just enough to realize we had broken the exhaust pipe, but hardly enough to know whether running the car under such conditions would maim it for life. But though hunger won out, the real mechanic’s love for his engine was born in us, and feeling like parents who submit their only child to a major operation, we drove painfully at eight miles an hour the ten miles into B——, the town echoing to our coming.