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“Anything. Anything at all!”
Mr. Smith stood for a long time between his two mangy suitcases and did not move. Five, six minutes ticked by. There was no sound, save the two men’s breathing in the dusk.
Then at last, very firmly, Mr. Smith stooped to grasp the luggage handles.
Just then, Mr. Terle blinked. He leaned forward, cupping his hand to his ear.
Mr. Smith froze, his hands still on the luggage.
From away among the hills, a murmur, a soft and tremulous rumble.
“Storm coming!” hissed Mr. Terle.
The sound grew louder; a kind of whitish cloud rose up from the hills.
Mr. Smith stood tall on tiptoe.
Upstairs Mr. Fremley sat up like Lazarus.
Mr. Terle’s eyes grew wider and yet wider to take hold of what was coming. He held to the porch rail like the captain of a calm-foundered vessel feeling the first stir of some tropic breeze that smelled of lime and the ice-cool white meat of coconut. The smallest wind stro
ked over his aching nostrils as over the flues of a white-hot chimney.
“There!” cried Mr. Terle. “There!”
And over the last hill, shaking out feathers of fiery dust, came the cloud, the thunder, the racketing storm.
Over the hill the first car to pass in twenty days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.
Mr. Terle did not dare to look at Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith looked up, thinking of Mr. Fremley in his room.
Mr. Fremley, at the window, looked down and saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.
For the sound that the car made was curiously final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling off of waters. Now, with wire-ravelings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over the rear seat, the auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its ghost upon the air.
The old woman in the front seat of the car waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say, Forgive me, my friend is ill; I’ve known him a long while, and now I must see him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half minute longer listening to her car, and there was something so peaceful about her that Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith leaned slowly toward her. At last she looked at them with a grave smile and raised her hand.
Mr. Fremley was surprised to see his hand go out the window above, and wave back to her.
On the porch Mr. Smith murmured, “Strange. It’s not a storm. And I’m not disappointed. How come?”
But Mr. Terle was down the path and to the car.
“We thought you were … that is …” He trailed off. “Terle’s my name, Joe Terle.”
She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.
“Miss Blanche Hillgood,” she said, quietly. “Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California.”
“Miss Hillgood, you don’t look to be going anywhere from here.”
“I had a feeling about that.” She watched the two men circle the car cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. “Is there nothing we can do?”
“Make a fence of the wheels, dinner gong of the brake drums, the rest’ll make a fine rock garden.”
Mr. Fremley shouted from the sky. “Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well—it’s way past time for supper!”
