ruh old Oregugon.

They started, shouting optimistically to each other, lights on, trouble
seeming over--and they stopped after the next descent, and pools of
tears were in the corners of Claire's eyes. The holdback had not
succeeded. Her big car, with its quick-increasing momentum, had jerked
at the bug as though it were a lard-can. The tow-rope had stretched,
sung, snapped, and again, in fire-shot delirium, she had gone rocking
down hill.

He drove up beside her, got out, stood at her elbow. His "I'm a bum
inventor. We'll try somethin' else" was so careless that, in her
nerve-twanging exhaustion she wailed, "Oh, don't be so beastly cheerful!
You don't care a bit!"

In the dusk she could see him straighten, and his voice came sharp as he
ignored the ever-present parental background and retorted, "Somebody has
got to be cheerful. Matter fact, I worked out the right stunt, coming
down."

Like a man in the dentist's chair, recovering between bouts, she drowsed
and ignored the fact that in a few minutes she would again have to
reassemble herself, become wakeful and calm, and go through quite
impossible maneuvers of driving. Milt was, with a hatchet from his
camping-kit, cutting down a large scrub pine. He dragged it to the Gomez
and hitched it to the back axle. The knuckles of the branches would dig
into the earth, the foliage catch at every pebble.

"There! That anchor would hold a truck!" he shouted.

It held. She went down the next two hills easily. But she was through.
Her forearms and brain were equally numb. She appealed to Milt, "I can't
seem to go on any more. It's so dark, and I'm so tired----"

"All right. No ranch houses anywheres near, so we'll camp here, if Mr.
Boltwood doesn't mind."

Claire stirred herself to help him prepare dinner. It wasn't much of a
dinner to prepare. Both cars had let provisions run low. They had bacon
and petrified ends of a loaf and something like coffee--not much like
it. Scientists may be interested in their discovery that as a substitute
for both cream and sugar in beverages strawberry jam is a fallacy.

For Mr. Boltwood's bed Milt hauled out the springy seat-cushions of both
cars. The Gomez cushion was three inches thicker than that of the bug,
which resulted in a mattress two stories in front with a lean-to at the
foot, and the entire edifice highly slippery. But with a blanket from
Milt's kit, it was sufficient. To Claire, Milt gave another blanket,
his collection of