In a flash he countered.
“Yo’ surely are a long ways from home.”
I laughed heartily, and with rapier speed replied,
“I surely am.”
******
They told us the road from Galveston to Houston (Hewston) was good—none better.
“Good shell road all the way. You’ll make time on that road.” This is the distinction between a Southerner and a Westerner. When the former tells you a road is good, he means that it once was good. When a Westerner tells you the same thing, he means that it is going to be good at some happy future date. In Texas the West and South meet.
We crossed the three-mile causeway which Galveston built at an expense of two million dollars, to connect her island town with her mainland. On all sides of us flatness like the flatness of the sea stretched to the horizon, and but for the horizon would have continued still further. The air was balmy as springtime in Italy. Meadow larks perched fat and puffy on fenceposts, dripping abrupt melodies which began and ended nowhere. The sky, washed with weeks of rain, had been dipped in blueing and hung over the earth to dry. After enduring gray northern skies, we were intoxicated with happiness.
The happier I am, the faster I drive. The road of hard oyster shell we knew was good. They had told us we could make time on it, in so many words. Forty-eight miles an hour is not technically fast, but seems fast when you suddenly descend into a hard-edged hole a foot and a half deep.
When we had separated ourselves from our baggage, we examined the springs. By a miracle they were intact. In first gear, the car took a standing jump, and emerged from the hole. For one of her staid matronly build, she did very well at her first attempt. Later she learned to leap boulders, and skip lightly from precipice to precipice and if we could have kept her in training six months longer, she could have walked out halfway on a tight-rope, turned around and got back safely to land.