Smudge and all, we nearly embraced him when he took apart and put together the whole ignition system, and came out even. Presently, at the heart of that tightly closed metal box, on a tiny point hardly larger than a needle he discovered a few grains of sand, memento of our last sandstorm. Like the blood clot which strikes down robust men, it had stopped a ton of mechanism from functioning. Philosophizing thus, we idly watched the mechanic put together those intricate parts, little realizing how useful the experience would prove later.
It was part of the odd luck which from beginning to end followed us that our breakdown happened before we had re-entered the isolated Apache Trail, with its breakneck grades. Still, our adventure delayed us, until on entering the pass with its looming mountains and wild gorges shutting us away from the world, darkness had closed in around us,—the pitch-black of a wilderness night. Ahead lay the famed Fish Creek road, fairly terrifying a week ago when we climbed it in broad daylight. Now, in the dark, we were to descend this dizzy corkscrew which dropped a thousand feet in a mile and a quarter. One lamp gave only a feeble light, but the other threw a magnificent steady glare which pierced the loneliness of that jumble of crags and forests far below us. Would our brakes hold, and would our nerves obey us? Though I felt cool, I admit to gripping the steering-wheel harder than good driving required. From Toby’s direction came a funny noise.
“I just remembered Mother’s last words,” she explained.
We both laughed, though feebly, at the perennial joke.
Night has the effect of seeming to double distances. At the pinnacle of this crag we paused a second. Below, we looked down vast depths upon the points of lesser pinnacles, jumbled in the valley. There was no bottom to the Pit directly under our headlights. Used to scenery with a bottom to it, however remote, we had rather a prejudice in favor of it. Beyond the radius of our lights we could pierce the blackness only in vague outlines. Then we dropped down, taking each switchback with caution. The nose of the car swung periodically out over the edge, daring our brakes to go the inch more which meant a mile—downward. One loose rock, of which there were so many, might send us spinning, crashing among the treetops below. But why harrow the reader unnecessarily? It must be evident we reached the bottom in safety. Yet halfway down I was not so sure of the outcome, for a spark of light and a little click, regular and ominous, came from the engine, just when the grade pitched the car head-down. I took the turns with my heart in my mouth. When we reached fairly level ground again we investigated. It was only a loose wire, connecting with the cylinders, but a little longer descend and we might have had a cross circuit,—and trouble.
It was good to have the valley come up to us. It was very good to see little friendly lights twinkling in the vast circle of the hills. The lights meant the Inn, and our day’s journey ended. The host welcomed us, rather astonished that two Easterners should have risked that hill at night. Had there been any other way we should have taken it, but no grassy meadows offered where we could run the car in safety; only empty chasms or perpendicular cliffs. Once on the road we had to go on. Then, too, we preferred the hot and appetizing food of the Inn to our own amateur camp cooking. Food is a powerful magnet.
Toward sunset next day we had passed beyond the lake of cobalt which science had set in the golden circlet of the desert. We had left the haunts of motors. As we rose from one hilly crest to the next higher, we met only an occasional prospector, afoot, or an emigrant from Utah with an old-time prairie schooner and a flock of burros. We were on that further branch of the T-shaped trail named Apache, and later we turned due north, and left it for mountain ranges of sweeping loveliness. I cannot, at the risk of boring, write of mountains without enthusiasm. These were on a colossal scale, as befits the Rockies, but their grandeur did not repel. They were homey mountains. As we traveled upward over the same kind of shelf-road with which the Winkleman trail had made us so quickly familiar, we could look down upon range after range, their blues and ochres melting together as far as eye could reach.
In a cup of these hills, yet so high it was itself on a mountain, the road forked sharply, each branch leading straight up a mountain, and each seeming well-nigh unconquerable. Below lay a little mining settlement of half a dozen cabins. At the juncture a sign-board bore the name of the town toward which we were traveling. It was an excellent sign-board, plainly marked. Its only draw-back was that it pointed midway between the two roads, quite impartially. Toby was for taking the right fork, I for the left. We argued hotly but finally Toby won, and we took the right-hand road. Soon the mining camp dropped several hundred feet below, and then became a dot. Ahead, the road circled in a twenty-mile horse-shoe on the inside of a mountain range, seeming to lead miles into the wilderness. I announced that Toby was mistaken.
“The Mormon said to take the right turn,” said Toby, standing to her guns.
“And we’ve taken half a dozen right turns since then,” I answered. Now the problem facing us was: To turn a heavy car with a 122 inch wheel-base around on a steep twelve-foot road with a mountain slope on one side and on the other, sheer precipice. Often in nightmares of late I had found myself compelled to drive down Bright Angel Trail at the Grand Canyon, turn at Jacob’s Ladder, and ascend,—and the present reality was hardly less terrifying. It turned out later that Toby was right, as she always was when she should have been wrong,—and we could have been spared our acrobatics. But we should have missed Mr. Kelly.