mpleting college. He'll learn
dignity--or perhaps lose his simplicity and be ruined; and then I'll
marry him off to some nice well-bred pink-face, like Jeff Saxton's
pretty cousin--who may turn him into a beastly money-grubber; and I'm
monkeying with destiny, and I ought to be slapped, and I realize it, and
I can't help it, and all my latent instinct as a feminine meddler is
aroused, and--golly, I almost went off that curve!"

CHAPTER XV

THE BLACK DAY OF THE VOYAGE

That was the one black day of her voyage--black stippled with crimson.

It began with the bear's invasion of the car, resulting in long
claw-marks across the upholstery, the loss of some particularly good
candy bought at a Park hotel, and genuine grief abiding after the
sentimental tragedy of Vere de Vere's death. The next act was the
ingenious loss of all power of her engine. She forgot that, before
breakfast, Milt had filled the oil-well for her. When she stopped for
gasoline, and the seller inquired, "Quart of oil?"--she absently nodded.
So the cylinders filled with surplus oil, the spark-plugs were fouled,
and the engine had the power of a sewing machine.

She could not make Mount Washburn--she could not make even the slopes of
the lower road. Now she knew the agony of the feeble car in the
mountains--most shameful and anxious of a driver's dolors: the brisk
start up the hill, the belief that you will keep on going this time; the
feeling of weariness through all the car; the mad shifting of gears, the
slipping of the clutch, and more gas, and less gas, and wondering
whether more gas or less is the better, and the appalling knocking when
you finally give her a lot too much gas; the remembrance, when it's too
late, to retard the spark; the safe crawling up to the last sharp pitch,
just fifteen feet from the summit; the car's halting; the yelp at your
passenger, "Jump out and push!"; the painful next five feet; and the
final death of the power just as the front wheels creep up over the
pitch. Then the anxious putting on of brakes--holding the car with both
foot-brake and emergency, lest it run down backward, slip off the road.
The calf of your leg begins to ache from the pressure on the foot-brake,
and with an unsuccessful effort to be courteous you bellow at the
passenger, who has been standing beside the car looking deprecatory,
"Will you please block the back wheels with a stone--hustle up, will
you!"

All this routine Claire thoroughly l