Just because Bert had made that tiny mistake in judgment—A frenzy of protest rose in Helen, beating itself against the inexorable fact. It could not be true! It could not be true that so small an incident had brought such calamity. It was a nightmare. She would not believe it.
“O Bert! It isn’t true! It isn’t—it isn’t—O Bert!” She stopped that in harsh self-contempt. It was true. “Get up and face it, you coward, you coward!”
She made herself rise, bathed her face and shoulders with cool water. The mirror showed her dull eyes and a mass of frowsy hair stuck through with hairpins. She took out the pins and began tugging at the snarls with a comb. Everything had become unreal; the solid walls about her, the voices coming up from the street below, impalpable things; she herself was least real of all, a shadow moving among shadows. But she must go on; she must do something.
Money. Bert needed money. It was the only thing that stood between him and unthinkable horrors of suffering and disgrace. His father would not help him. Her people could not. Somehow she must get money, a great deal of money.
She did not think out the idea; it was suddenly there in her mind. It was a chance, the only one. She stood at the window, looking out over the low roofs of Coalinga to the sand hills covered with derricks. There was money there. “Millions of dollars a year.” She would take Bert’s vacant place, sell the farm he had failed to sell, save him.
Her normal self was as lifeless as if it were in a trance, but beneath its dull weight a small clear brain worked as steadily as the ticking of a clock. It knew Ripley Farmland Acres; it recalled scraps of talk with the salesmen; it reminded her of photographs and blank forms and price lists. She dressed quickly, twisting her hair into a tidy knot, dashing talcum powder on her perspiring face and neck. From Bert’s suitcase she hurriedly gathered a bunch of Ripley Farmland Acres literature and tucked it into a salesman’s leather wallet. At the door she turned back to get a pencil.
The hotel was an empty place to her. If the idlers looked at her curiously over their waving fans when she went through the lobby she did not know it. It was like opening the door of an oven to meet the white glare of the street, but she walked briskly into it. She knew where to find the livery-stable, and to the man who lounged from its hay-scented dimness to meet her she said crisply:
“I want a horse and buggy right away, please.”
She waited on the worn boards of the driveway while he brought out a horse and backed it between the shafts. He remarked that it was a hot day; he inquired casually if she was going far. To the oil fields, she said. East or west? “East,” she replied at a venture. “Oh, the Limited?” Yes, the Limited, she agreed. When she had climbed into the buggy and picked up the reins, it occurred to her to ask him what road to take.
When she had passed Whiskey Row the road ran straight before her, a black line of oiled sand drawn to a vanishing-point on the level desert. The horse trotted on with patient perseverance, the parched buggy rattled behind him, and she sat motionless with the reins in her hands. Around her the air quivered in great waves above the hot yellow sand; it rippled above the black road like the colorless vibrations on the lid of a stove. Far ahead she saw a small dot, which she supposed was the Limited. She would arouse herself when she reached it. Her brain was as motionless as her body, waiting.
Centuries went past her. She reached the dot, and found a watering-trough and an empty house. She unchecked the horse, who plunged his nose eagerly into the water. His sides were rimed with dried sweat, and with the drinking can she poured over him water, which almost instantly evaporated. She was sorry for him.
When she was in the buggy again and he was once more trotting patiently down the long road she found that she was looking at herself and him from some far distance, and finding it fantastic that one little animal should be sitting upright in a contrivance of wood and leather, while another little animal drew it industriously across a minute portion of the earth’s surface. Her mind became motionless again, as though suspended in the quivering intensity of heat.
Hours later she saw that the road was winding over hills of sand. A few derricks were scattered upon them. She stopped at another watering-trough, and in the house beside it a faded woman, keeping the screen door hooked between them, told her that the Limited was four miles farther on. It did not occur to her to ask anything more. Her mind was set, like an alarm clock, for the Limited.
She drove into it at last. It was like a small part of a city, hacked off and set freakishly in a hollow of the sand hills. A dozen huge factory buildings faced a row of two-story bunkhouses. Loaded wagons clattered down the street between them, and electric power wires crisscrossed overhead. On the hillside was a group of small cottages, their porches curtained with wilting vines.
