"Those Beaches-their kin are judges and senators and college Presidents, all over New England," she said. "This doctor must be the grandson of the ambassador, I fancy."
"Honest? I thought they were just regular folks. Was I nice?"
"Of course you were."
"Did I-did I wash my paws and sit up and beg?"
"No, you aren't a little dog. I'm that. You're the big mastiff that guards the house, while I run and yip." She was turned toward him, smiling. Her hand was beside him. He touched the back of it with his forefinger, as though he was afraid he might soil it.
There seemed to be no reason, but he was trembling as he stammered, "I-I-I'm d-darn glad I didn't know they were anybody, or 'd have been as bad as a flivver driver the first time he tries a t-twelve-cylinder machine. G-gee your hand is little!"
She took it back and inspected it. "I suppose it is. And pretty useless."
"N-no, it isn't, but your shoes are. Why don't you wear boots when you're out like this?" A flicker of his earlier peremptoriness came into his voice. She resented it:
"My shoes are perfectly sensible! I will not wear those horrible vegetarian uplift sacks on my feet!"
"Your shoes may be all right for New York, but you're not going to New York for a while. You've simply got to see some of this country while you're out here-British Columbia and Alaska."
"Would be nice, but I've had enough roughing--"
"Chance to see the grandest mountains in the world, almost, and then you want to go back to tea and all that junk!"
"Stop trying to bully me! You have been dictatorial ever since we started up--"
"Have I? Didn't mean to be. Though I suppose I usually am bullying. At least I run things. There's two kinds of people; those that give orders, and those that naturally take them; and I belong to the first one, and--"
"But my dear Milt, so do I, and really--"
"And mostly I'd take them from you. But hang it, Seattle is just a day away, and you'll forget me. Wish I could kidnap you. Have half a mind to. Take you way up into the mountains, and when you got used to roughing it in sure-enough wilderness-say you'd helped me haul timber for a flume-then we'd be real pals. You have the stuff in you, but you still need toughening before--"
"Listen to me, Milton. You have been reading fiction, about this man-sometimes he's a lumberjack, and sometimes a trapper or a miner, but always he's frightfully hairy-and he sees a charming woman in the city, and kidnaps her, and shuts her up in some unspeakable shanty, and makes her eat nice cold boiled potatoes, and so naturally, she simply adores him! A hundred men have written that story, and it's an example of their insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent. Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today who don't live just to please majesties' fancies. If a woman like me were kidnapped, she would go on hating the brute, or if she did give in, then the man would lose anyway, because she would have degenerated; she'd have turned into a slave, and lost exactly the things he'd liked in her. Oh, you cavemen! With your belief that you can force women to like you! I have more courage than any of you!"
"I admit you have courage, but you'd have still more, if you bucked the wilds."
"Nonsense! In New York I face every day a hundred complicated problems you don't know I ever heard of!"
"Let me remind you that Brer Julius Cæsar said he'd rather be mayor in a little Spanish town than police commissioner in Rome. I'm king in Schoenstrom, while you're just one of a couple hundred thousand bright people in New York--"
"Really? Oh, at least a million. Thanks!"
"Oh-gee-Claire, I didn't mean to be personal, and get in a row and all, but-can't you see-kind of desperate-Seattle so soon--"
Her face was turned from him; its thin profile was firm as silver wire. He blundered off into silence and-they were at it again!
"I didn't mean to make you angry," he gulped.
"Well, you did! Bullying--You and your men of granite, in mackinaws and a much-needed shave, trying to make a well-bred woman satisfied with a view consisting of rocks and stumps and socks on the line! Let me tell you that compared with a street canyon, a mountain canyon is simply dead, and yet these unlettered wild men--"
"See here! I don't know if you're firing these adjectives at me, but I don't know that I'm so much more unlettered--You talked about taking French in your finishing-school. Well, they taught American in mine!"
"They would!"
Then he was angry. "Yes, and chemistry and physics and Greek and Latin and history and mathematics and economics, and I took more or less of a whirl at all of them, while you were fiddling with ribbons, and then I had to buck mechanics and business methods."
"I also 'fiddled' with manners-an unfortunate omission in your curriculum, I take it! You have been reasonably rude--"
"So have you!"
"I had to be! But I trust you begin to see that even your strong hand couldn't control a woman's taste. Kidnapping! As intelligent a boy as you wanting to imitate these boorish movie--"
"Not a darn bit more boorish than your smart set, with its champagne and these orgies at country clubs--"
"You know so much about country clubs, don't you! The worst orgy I ever saw at one was the golf champion reading the beauty department in Boudoir. Would you mind backing up your statements about the vices of myself and my friends--"
"Oh, you. Oh, I didn't mean--"
"Then why did you--"
"Now you're bullying me, and you know that if the smart set isn't vicious, at least it's so snobbish that it can't see any--"
"Then it's wise to be snobbish, because if it did condescend--"
"I won't stand people talking about condescending--"
"Would you mind not shouting so?"
"Very well! I'll keep still!"
Silence again, while both of them looked unhappy, and tried to remember just what they had been fighting about. They did not at first notice a small red car larruping gaily over the road beneath the ledge, though the driver was a pink-haired man in a green coat. He was almost gone before Milt choked, "It's Pinky!"
"Pink! Pinky!" he bellowed.
Pinky looked back but, instead of stopping, he sped up, and kept going.
CHAPTER XXI. THE MINE OF LOST SOULS
"That couldn't have been Pinky! Why! Why, the car he had was red," cried Claire.
"Sure. The idiot's got hold of some barn paint somewhere, and tried to daub it over. He's trying to make a getaway with it!"
"We'll chase him. In my car."
"Don't you mind?"
"Of course not. I do not give up my objections to the roughing philosophy, but--You were right about these shoes--Oh, don't leave me behind! Want to go along!"
These sentences she broke, scattered, and totally lost as she scrambled after him, down the rocks. He halted. His lips trembled. He picked her up, carried her down, hesitated a second while his face-curiously foreshortened as she looked up at it from his big arms-twisted with emotion. He set her down gently, and she climbed into the Gomez.
It seemed to her that he drove rather too carefully, too slowly. He took curves and corners evenly. His face was as empty of expression, as unmelodramatic, as that of a jitney driver. Then she looked at the speedometer. He was making forty-eight miles an hour down hill and forty to thirty on upgrades.
They were in sight of the fleeing Pinky in two miles. Pinky looked back; instantly was to be seen pulling his hat low, stooping over-the demon driver. Milt merely sat more erect, looked more bland and white-browed and steady.
The bug fled before them on a winding shelf road. It popped up a curve, then slowed down. "He took it too fast. Poor Pink!" said Milt.
They gained on that upslope, but as the road dropped, the bug started forward desperately. Another car was headed toward them; was drawn to the side of the road, in one of the occasional widenings. Pinky passed it so carelessly that, with crawling spine, Claire saw the outer wheels of the bug on the very edge of the road-the edge of a fifty-foot drop. Milt went easily past the halted car-even waved his hand to the waiting driver.