“If you ask me, Mrs. Flanagan,” he began diplomatically, “I’d advise the young ladies to take a chance. I think they can make it.”
Something in this advice, slightly stressed, implied a warning. Mrs. Flanagan with her swarthy Mexican features was not the most prepossessing landlady in the world, nor did a lonely roadhouse on the edge of the desert, with no other guests than ourselves, promise complete security. Tales of Swiss inns, and trap-doors yawning at midnight came to me, faintly conveyed by the young man’s tones. She turned on him with ill-concealed anger.
“It’s nothin’ to me, go or stay. But here’s a good hotel,—with a bath-room, even,—and there’s night, and sandy roads, and a stor’rm comin’. If ye had a man wid ye, I’d say ‘go on,’ though it’s not safe, even f’r a man. But bein’ two ladies, I say stop here.”
We wavered, anxious to get on, but not to meet a violent end. On the pretext of filling our water-bag, the Gentleman from Philadelphia took us aside.
“Don’t let Mrs. Flanagan fool you,” he advised. “She only wants customers. I stayed here once,” he twitched nervously,—“and I’d rather run the chance of being robbed and murdered. Not that I think that will happen to you.”
So we thanked him, nice brisk, friendly young man that he was, taking care not to incriminate him before the watchful Mrs. Flanagan, and bade that lady adieu. She gloomily wished us good luck, but it was apparently more than she dared hope.
“Only last week, two men were held up and murdered by the Mexicans,” she called after us. “Watch out for thim Mexicans,—they’re a wicked bad lot.”
With the sky yellow-green from the gathering sand-storm, night coming on fast and her warning in our ears we struck out into our first desert with a sense of uneasiness, exhilarated a little by the warm beauty of the evening. We seemed to have left all civilization behind, although after passing the last hamlet about nightfall, we had only forty-odd miles more to go. Never shall I forget the eerie charm of that drive. We saw not a soul. Occasionally a jack rabbit, startled as ourselves, leaped athwart the gleam of our lamps. Sometimes we wandered, in the pitchy black, from the guiding Southern Pacific into a maze of twisting trails. Sometimes we dived into a sudden arroyo, wrenching the car about just in time to stay with the road as it serpentined out again. When, now and again, a lonely light far off suggested a lurking bandit, we remembered with a homesick twinge the last words of Toby’s mother, and wondered when we should get a chance to obey them. At four cross roads, the only guide post lay flat midway between the roads. We were obliged to guess at the most likely route. At last we came on the lights of Deming, five miles away, in the valley. We sighed with relief and moved toward them rapidly.
And then a figure stepped out from a truck blocked beside the road, and a deep voice called “Stop a moment, please!”
At that moment we sincerely wished ourselves back in Mrs. Flanagan’s road house. Then, before Toby could get out the monkey wrench which was our sole weapon of defense, the voice changed shrilly on a high note, and we saw our bandit was a fourteen year old boy. He hopped aboard, never dreaming of the panic he had caused our bandit-beset minds, explaining that his batteries were out of order, and he must return to Deming. He added, naïvely, that his father owned the second best hotel in town, which he recommended if we failed to find a room in the best hotel. Then he swung off the car, and we went on to the Mecca of all Western voyagers,—a clean room, a hot bath, and a Harvey eating house.