liged if
you'd get me some more."
"Wa-all, I'm purty busy."
"I'll pay you anything you ask."
The milkman was modest in his ambitions.
"How'd two dollars strike ye?"
"Five would be better if you hurried."
This looked suspicious, but the milkman consented.
"Wa-all, all right, but what would I fetch the gasolene in?"
"One of your milk-cans."
"They're all fuller melk."
"I'll buy one, milk and all."
"Wa-all, I reckon I'll hev to oblige you."
"Here's five dollars on account. There'll be five more when you get
back."
"Wa-all, all ri-ight. Get along there, Jawn Henry."
John Henry got along. Even his _cloppety-clop_ did not waken Miss
Webling.
The return of the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with
the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion,
finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three
strange men at work outside.
When the tank was filled, Davidge entered her compartment with a
cheery "Good morning," and slammed the door after him. The gasolene,
like the breath of a god, gave life to the dead. The car snarled and
jumped, and went roaring across the bridge, up the hill and down
another, and down that and up another.
Here they caught, through a frame of leaves, a glimpse of Washington
in the sunrise, a great congregation of marble temples and trees and
sky-colored waters, the shaft of the Monument lighted with the milky
radiance of a mountain peak on its upper half, the lower part still
dusk with valley shadow, and across the plateau of roofs the solemn
Capitol in as mythical a splendor as the stately dome that Kubla Khan
decreed in Xanadu.
This sight of Canaan from Pisgah-height was no luxury to the
taxi-driver, and he hustled his coffee-grinder till he reached Rosslyn
once more, crossed the Potomac's many-tinted stream, and rattled
through Georgetown and the shabby, sleeping little shops of M Street
into the tree-tunnels of Washington.
He paused to say, "Where do we go from here?"
Davidge and Marie Louise looked their chagrin. They still had no place
to go.
"To the Pennsylvania Station," said Davidge. "We can at least get
breakfast there."
The streets of Washington are never so beautiful as at this still hour
when nothing stirs but the wind in the trees and the grass on the
lawns, and hardly anybody is abroad except the generals on their
bronze horses fronting their old battles with heroic eyes. The station
outside was s
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