She sat straight, shook her head. "Nope. I'll do it. And I'm not going
to insist on being heroic any longer. I'll get a farmer to pull us out."
As she let herself down into the ooze, she reflected that all farmers
have hearts of gold, anatomical phenomena never found among the snobs
and hirelings of New York. The nearest heart of gold was presumably
beating warmly in the house a quarter of a mile ahead.
She came up a muddy lane to a muddy farmyard, with a muddy cur yapping
at her wet legs, and geese hissing in a pool of purest mud serene. The
house was small and rather old. It may have been painted once. The barn
was large and new. It had been painted very much, and in a blinding red
with white trimmings. There was no brass plate on the house, but on the
barn, in huge white letters, was the legend, "Adolph Zolzac, 1913."
She climbed by log steps to a narrow frame back porch littered with
parts of a broken cream-separator. She told herself that she was simple
and friendly in going to the back door instead of the front, and it was
with gaiety that she knocked on the ill-jointed screen door, which
flapped dismally in response.
"Ja?" from within.
She rapped again.
"Hinein!"
She opened the door on a kitchen, the highlight of which was a table
heaped with dishes of dumplings and salt pork. A shirt-sleeved man, all
covered with mustache and calm, sat by the table, and he kept right on
sitting as he inquired: "Vell?"
"My car--my automobile--has been stuck in the mud. A bad driver, I'm
afraid! I wonder if you would be so good as to----"
"I usually get t'ree dollars, but I dunno as I vant to do it for less
than four. Today I ain'd feelin' very goot," grumbled the
golden-hearted.
Claire was aware that a woman whom she had not noticed--so much smaller
than the dumplings, so much less vigorous than the salt pork was
she--was speaking: "Aber, papa, dot's a shame you sharge de poor young
lady dot, when she drive by sei self. Vot she t'ink of de Sherman
people?"
The farmer merely grunted. To Claire, "Yuh, four dollars. Dot's what I
usually charge sometimes."
"Usually? Do you mean to say that you leave that hole there in the road
right along--that people keep on trying to avoid it and get stuck as I
was? Oh! If I were an official----"
"Vell, I dunno, I don't guess I run my place to suit you smart
alecks----"
"Papa! How you talk on the young lady! Make shame!"
"--from the city. If you don't like it, you stay bei Mineapolis! I
haul you out for t'ree dollars and a half. Everybody pay dot. Last mont'
I make forty-five dollars. They vos all glad to pay. They say I help
them fine. I don't see vot you're kickin' about! Oh, these vimmins!"