More bashful than most Texans, the lank Horace followed me in painful silence for a few yards. Then in a burst of confidence, he said, “When you come in just now, I thought it was maw dressed up to fool us. Yes, sir, I sure did.”
My glimpse of his septuagenarian parent would not have led me to suspect her of such prankishness, but appearances are often deceitful. For all I knew she may have been just the life of the family, doubling up Horace and his paw in long writhes of helpless mirth at her impersonations. So I accepted the compliment silently and led our rescuer to the car.
Once more I triumphed unworthily over Toby. For she had hinted that my fast driving had flattened the tire, but investigation revealed a crooked nail,—the bane of motoring in a cattle country. Horace proved most business-like in handling tools. In less than half an hour, bashfully spurred on by our admiration, he had cut the lock and helped us change the tire. Then he saw our sign,—and said it. As if it were a thought new-born to the ages, he smiled at his own conceit, and remarked, “You’re a lawng ways from home!”
As Horace did not smoke, we drove away from the ranch-house eternally in his debt. We put him down to the credit of Texas, however, where he helped off-set sand-storms and mud holes, and added him to the fast growing list of cavaliers who had rescued us from our folly. The storm had died, and with it our bad luck had apparently departed, but when a day begins badly, it is never safe to predict until the car is bedded down for the night. According to a bad habit she has, Toby telescoped two paragraphs of the route card, skipping the middle entirely. Consequently we turned left when we should have gone right,—and found our front wheels banked where a road had been playfully altered by the wind to a mountain of sand. On all sides were waist-high drifts of fine white sea sand, from which the tops of mesquite bushes showed. We could not turn, so we tried running straight ahead,—and stuck. Twilight had fallen, and if there were a way out, it was no longer discernible. At what seemed a short half mile, a light gleamed from a house. Once more, I cravenly went for help, while the optimistic Toby began to shovel sand with our toy shovel. The half mile trebled itself, and still the house was no nearer. At last I came to the end, only to find that a wide canal separated us and the car from the road. I shouted across to two men in a corral, and at last they heard and came to the edge of the canal while I asked to borrow a rope. They debated a while, perhaps doubting my intentions, but finally threw a rope in the back of a little car, cranked it and, coming to the bank of the canal, helped me across. Unlike a Westerner who when he leaves a spot never fails to orient himself, I had not noticed in which direction I had struck out from the car. I fear my deliverers thought me a mild kind of incompetent when I confessed I had no idea where to find it: darkness and sand dunes completely hid it from sight. But after some skirmishing about canal beds and bridges, we reached the broad shape looming up in the dark, and found that Toby had dug the car out, wrapped an old tire about the spinning back wheel, and driven it on firm ground.
Our rescuers put us on the road to our night’s objective, and with mild patience told us we could hardly miss it, it being a straight road all the way. They did not compliment us too highly, for by the time Venus had risen we reached the hotel, kept by a sad, distrustful one-eyed man from Maine, who in spite of twenty years’ residence still abhorred Texas as a desert. He fed us liberally with baked beans and apple pie before showing us to a bare, clean little room furnished with a tin basin and a patchwork quilt.
We were nearly dead. We had much with which to reproach luck and each other, but by mutual consent postponed it and sank into peaceful sleep in the lumpy bed.
As somebody said, luck is a fickle dame. Having flouted us to her heart’s content, she tagged docilely at our heels as we started for El Paso next morning. Two hundred miles away, the average run was ten hour’s time, but we made it in eight and a half. The garage-man’s wife’s cousin was a dentist on Huntington Avenue, and the extraordinary coincidence drew her to us almost as by the bonds of kinship. She hurried her spouse into mending our tires promptly, and speeding us on our way with valuable directions. It was ten when we left, but moving westward into Rocky Mountain time saved us an hour.
Once out of the village we encountered the enveloping desert again. Driving in those sandy tracks became a new sport,—we learned to make the sand skid us around corners without decreasing our speed; we could calculate with nicety when a perceptible drag on the wheels warned us to shift gears. And then they must be shifted instantly, for at a moment’s delay the car sank deep, and mischief was done which only shoveling could undo. Once we found ourselves facing another car blocking the road, and sunk in thick, unpacked sand. We could not turn out, and the instant’s stop put us in a like predicament. They wistfully asked us to pull them out, but as we were heavier than they, and would have made two obstacles instead of one in the road, we had to refuse the only help asked of us, who had so many times been the beneficiaries. We left them to an approaching mule team, after they had returned good for evil by pushing us out of the sand. For twenty miles we had hard going, but by spinning through the sand in low gear we escaped trouble.
We were still in the desert, but serrated peaks with lovely outlines and stormy, snowy tops marched beside us the entire day. The aspect of the country became semi-tropical. The single varieties of cactus and century plants were increased to dozens. The ocotillo, sometimes wrongly called octopus cactus, waved slender green fingers, on which a red bud showed like a rosy fingernail. The landscape warmed from lifeless gray to gold, mauve, blue and deep purple, and always on our left were the benign outlines of the blue Davis Mountains. We mounted higher and higher on a smooth orange road cut through the mountains and came out on a broad open highway with wide vistas. Close by, the mountains looked like huge heaps of black cinder and silt, but distance thinned them, as if cut from paper, into translucent lavender and blue, the edges luminous from the setting sun.
Thirty miles out of El Paso we were astonished to find ourselves on a concrete road in perfect museum condition, on which in dismal file many cars crept city-ward at the discreet pace of fifteen miles an hour. It was the first bit of good road Toby had encountered for days but an uncanny something in the self-restraint of the El Pasans on the only good road in Texas recalled Houston to us. We joined the funereal procession and arrived in the city without official escort.