e mrwr!"

"You don't say so!" Milt answered in surprise. "Well, if I promised to
take you, I'll keep my word." He vaulted out, tucked Vere de Vere into
the seat, protecting her from the rain with the tarpaulin winter
radiator-cover.

His rut-skipping car overtook the mud-walloping Gomez-Dep in an hour,
and pulled it out of the mud.

Before Milt slept that night, in his camp three miles from Gopher
Prairie, he went through religious rites.

"Girl like her, she's darn particular about her looks. I'm a sloppy
hound. Used to be snappier about my clothes when I was in high school.
Getting lazy--too much like Mac. Think of me sleeping in my clothes last
night!"

"Mrwr!" rebuked the cat.

"You're dead right. Fierce is the word. Nev' will sleep in my duds
again, puss. That is, when I have a reg'lar human bed. Course camping,
different. But still---- Let's see all the funny things we can do to
us."

He shaved--two complete shaves, from lather to towel. He brushed his
hair. He sat down by a campfire sheltered between two rocks, and fought
his nails, though they were discouragingly crammed with motor grease.
Throughout this interesting but quite painful ceremony Milt kept up a
conversation between himself as the World's Champion Dude, and his cat
as Vallay. But when there was nothing more to do, and the fire was low,
and Vere de Vere asleep in the sleeve of the winter ulster, his
bumbling voice slackened; in something like agony he muttered:

"But oh, what's the use? I can't ever be anything but a dub! Cleaning my
nails, to make a hit with a girl that's got hands like hers! It's a long
trail to Seattle, but it's a darn sight longer one to being--being--well,
sophisticated. Oh! And incidentally, what the deuce am I going to do in
Seattle if I do get there?"

CHAPTER VI

THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS

Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew.
Rippling and blue, with long grass up to its edge, a spot of dancing
light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an
afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring
morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley
or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the
occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on
the treeless Great Plains.

She had learned to call the slews "pugholes," and to watch for ducks at
twilight. She had learned that about th