On the edge of Kootenai Canyon, feeling more like an aviator than like
an automobilist, Claire had driven, and now, nearing Idaho, she had
entered a national forest. She was delayed for hours, while she tried to
change a casing, after a blow-out when the spare tire was deflated. She
wished for Milt. She would never see him again. She was sorry. He hadn't
meant---But hang it, she panted, if he admired her at all, he'd be here now and
get on this per-fect-ly beast-ly casing, over which she had been
laboring for a dozen years; and she was simply too ridiculously tired;
and was there any respectful way of keeping Henry B. from beaming in
that benevolent manner while she was killing herself; and look at those
fingernails; and--oh, drrrrrrat that casing!
To make the next town, after this delay, she had to drive for hours by
night through the hulking pines of the national forest. It was her first
long night drive.
A few claims, with log cabins of recent settlers, once or twice the
shack of a forest-ranger, a telephone in a box by the road or a rough R.
F. D. box nailed to a pine trunk, these indicated that civilization
still existed, but they were only melancholy blurs. She was in a cold
enchantment. All of her was dead save the ability to keep on driving,
forever, with no hope of the tedium ending. She was bewildered. She
passed six times what seemed to be precisely the same forest clearing,
always with the road on a tiny ridge to the left of the clearing, always
with a darkness-stilled house at one end and always, in the pasture at
the other end, a horse which neighed. She was in a panorama stage-scene;
things moved steadily by her, there was a sound of the engine, and a
sensation of steering, but she was forever in the same place, among the
same pines, with the same scowling blackness between their bare clean
trunks. Only the road ahead was clear: a one-way track, the foot-high
earthy bank and the pine-roots beside it, two distinct ruts, and a
roughening of strewn brown bark and pine-needles, which, in the beating
light of the car's lamps, made the sandy road scabrous with little
incessant shadows.
She had never known anything save this strained driving on. Jeff and
Milt were old tales, and untrue. Was it ten hours before that she had
cooked dinner beside the road? No matter. She wasn't hungry any longer.
She would never reach the next town--and she didn't care. It wasn't she,
but a grim spirit which had entered her dead body, that kept steering,
feeding gas, watching the road.
In the darkness outside the funnel of light from her lamps were shadows
that leaped, and gray hands hastily jerked back out of sight behind tree
trunks as she came up; things that followed her, and hidden men waiting
for her to stop.