She saw a dozen camping devices unknown to the East: trailers, which by
day bobbed along behind the car like coffins on two wheels, but at night
opened into tents with beds, an ice-box, a table; tents covering a bed
whose head rested on the running-board; beds made-up in the car, with
the cushions as mattresses.
The Great Transcontinental Highway was colored not by motors alone. It
is true that the Old West of the stories is almost gone; that Billings,
Miles City, Bismarck, are more given to Doric banks than to gambling
hells. But still are there hints of frontier days. Still trudge the
prairie schooners; cowpunchers in chaps still stand at the doors of log
cabins--when they are tired of playing the automatic piano; and blanket
Indians, Blackfeet and Crows, stare at five-story buildings--when they
are not driving modern reapers on their farms.
They all waved to Claire. Telephone linemen, lolling with pipes and
climber-strapped legs in big trucks, sang out to her; traction engine
crews shouted; and these she found to be her own people. Only once did
she lose contentment--when, on the observation platform of a train bound
for Seattle, she saw a Britisher in flannels and a monocle, headed
perhaps for the Orient. As the train slipped silkenly away, the Gomez
seemed slow and clumsy, and the strain of driving intolerable. And that
Britisher must be charming---- Then a lonely, tight-haired woman in the
doorway of a tar-paper shack waved to her, and in that wistful gesture
Claire found friendship.
And sometimes in the "desert" of yet unbroken land she paused by the
Great Highway and forgot the passion to keep going---She sat on a rock, by a river so muddy that it was like yellow milk. The
only trees were a bunch of cottonwoods untidily scattering shreds of
cotton, and the only other vegetation left in the dead world was
dusty green sagebrush with lumps of gray yet pregnant earth between,
or a few exquisite green and white flashes of the herb called
Snow-on-the-Mountain. The inhabitants were jackrabbits, or American
magpies in sharp black and white livery, forever trying to balance their
huge tails against the wind, and yelling in low-magpie their opinion of
tourists.
She did not desire gardens, then, nor the pettiness of plump terraced
hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to
it by her own plodding. Her soul--if she hadn't had one, it would
immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, the moment she
sat there--sailed with the hawks in the high thin air, and when it came
down it sang hallelujahs, because the sagebrush fragrance was more
healing than piney woods, because the sharp-bitten edges of the buttes
were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise, and because a real person,
one Milt Daggett, though she would never see him again, had found her
worthy of worship.