er--lunch--with her by the road----"

In the reaction of anger he demanded of Vere de Vere, "What the deuce do
I care? If she's chump enough to chase away a crack garage man that's
gone batty and wants to work for nothing, let her go on and hit some
crook garage and get stuck for an entire overhauling. What do I care?
Had nice trip; that's all I wanted. Never did intend to go clear to
Seattle, anyway. Go on to Butte, then back home. No more fussing about
fool table-manners and books, and I certainly will cut out tagging
behind her! No, sir! Nev-er again!"

It was somewhat inconsistent to add, "There's a bully place--sneak in
and let her get past me again. But she won't catch me following next
time!"

While he tried to keep up his virtuous anger, he was steering into an
abandoned farmyard, parking the car behind cottonwoods and neglected
tall currant bushes which would conceal it from the road.

The windows of the deserted house stared at him; a splintered screen
door banged in every breeze. Lichens leered from the cracks of the
porch. The yard was filled with a litter of cottonwood twigs, and over
the flower garden hulked ragged weeds. In the rank grass about the slimy
green lip of the well, crickets piped derisively. The barn-door was
open. Stray kernels of wheat had sprouted between the spokes of a rusty
binder-wheel. A rat slipped across the edge of the shattered manger. As
dusk came on, gray things seemed to slither past the upper windows of
the house, and somewhere, under the roof, there was a moaning. Milt was
sure that it was the wind in a knothole. He told himself that he was
absolutely sure about it. And every time it came he stroked Vere de Vere
carefully, and once, when the moaning ended in the slamming of the
screen door, he said, "Jiminy!"

This boy of the unghostly cylinders and tangible magnetos had never
seen a haunted house. To toil of the harvest field and machine shop and
to trudging the sun-beaten road he was accustomed, but he had never
crouched watching the slinking spirits of old hopes and broken
aspirations; feeble phantoms of the first eager bridegroom who had come
to this place, and the mortgage-crushed, rust-wheat-ruined man who had
left it. He wanted to leap into the bug and go on. Yet the haunt of
murmurous memories dignified his unhappiness. In the soft, tree-dimmed
dooryard among dry, blazing plains it seemed indecent to go on growling
"Gee," and "Can you beat it?" It was a young poet