k, these indicated that civilization
still existed, but they were only melancholy blurs. She was in a cold
enchantment. All of her was dead save the ability to keep on driving,
forever, with no hope of the tedium ending. She was bewildered. She
passed six times what seemed to be precisely the same forest clearing,
always with the road on a tiny ridge to the left of the clearing, always
with a darkness-stilled house at one end and always, in the pasture at
the other end, a horse which neighed. She was in a panorama stage-scene;
things moved steadily by her, there was a sound of the engine, and a
sensation of steering, but she was forever in the same place, among the
same pines, with the same scowling blackness between their bare clean
trunks. Only the road ahead was clear: a one-way track, the foot-high
earthy bank and the pine-roots beside it, two distinct ruts, and a
roughening of strewn brown bark and pine-needles, which, in the beating
light of the car's lamps, made the sandy road scabrous with little
incessant shadows.

She had never known anything save this strained driving on. Jeff and
Milt were old tales, and untrue. Was it ten hours before that she had
cooked dinner beside the road? No matter. She wasn't hungry any longer.
She would never reach the next town--and she didn't care. It wasn't she,
but a grim spirit which had entered her dead body, that kept steering,
feeding gas, watching the road.

In the darkness outside the funnel of light from her lamps were shadows
that leaped, and gray hands hastily jerked back out of sight behind tree
trunks as she came up; things that followed her, and hidden men waiting
for her to stop.

As drivers will, she tried to exorcise the creeping fear by singing. She
made up what she called her driving-song. It was intended to echo the
hoofs of a fat old horse on a hard road:

The old horse trots with a jog, jog, jog,
And a jog, jog, jog; and a jog, jog, jog.
And the old road makes a little jog, jog, jog,
To the west, jog, jog; and the north, jog, jog.
While the farmer drinks some cider from his jug, jug, jug,
From his coy jug, jug; from his joy jug, jug.
Till he accumulates a little jag, jag, jag,
And he jigs, jigs, jigs, with his jug, jug, jug----

The song was a comfort, at first--then a torment. She drove to it, and
she steered to it, and when she tried to forget, it sang itself in her
tired brain: "Jog, jog, jog--oh, _damn_!"

Her fath