"No. He'd work for Jeff two hours. Then Jeff would give him that 'You poor fish!' look, and Milt would hit him, and stroll out, and go to the North Pole or some place, and discover an oil-well, and hire Jeff as his nice, efficient general manager. And---- I do wish Milt would hurry, though!" It was dusk before they heard the pit-pit-pit chuckling down the hill. Milt's casual grin changed to bashfulness as Claire ran into the road, her arms wide in a lovely gesture of supplication, and cried, "We been waiting for you so long! One of my brake-bands is burnt out, and the other is punk." "Well, well. Let's try to figure out something to do." She waited reverently while the local prophet sat in his bug, stared at the wheels of the Gomez, and thought. The level-floored, sagebrush-sprinkled hollow had filled with mauve twilight and creeping stilly sounds. The knowable world of yellow lights and security was far away. Milt was her only means of ever getting back to it. "Tell you what we might try," he speculated. "I'll hitch on behind you, and hold back in going down hill." She did not even try to help him while he again cleaned the spark plugs and looked over brakes, oil, gas, water. She sat on the running-board, and it was pleasant to be relieved of responsibility. He said nothing at all. While he worked he whistled that recent refined ballad: I wanta go back to Oregon And sit on the lawn, and look at the dawn. Oh motheruh dear, don't leavuh me here, The leaves are so sere, in the fallothe year, I wanta go back to Oregugon, To dearuh 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.