A flight of purple grackles soared across the sky and dropped their bright iridescent blackness down among the autumn trees. They scattered on the ground, searching for favorite foods, filling the air with their strange fall sounds, those sounds that make summer seem so definitely a thing of the past and the autumn sunshine only a passing gesture. Phil turned his eyes to the scene he was passing and remembered days when he had wandered alone wishing for things that never came. There was a great flat stone by the roadside. He had sat there the morning he got the thorn in his foot and tried to extract it. There was the big tree whose gnarled roots had made an armchair where he came to study now and then when he had some hard task to master. It was cushioned with velvet moss. Sometimes when he had been sitting there for a while he would get the idea that maybe in the future something nice would happen to him and then he could forget all the gloom and drabness of his life and be really happy. Yes? He had actually believed that. And now look what was happening! Just out of college! No job, no special friends, no opportunity to forge into things and do something really worthwhile. War ahead! Just war! Life in a training camp! It hadn’t been very exciting so far. And then what? Nothing to get excited or happy about. Joy? Maybe there wasn’t any such thing as joy in this earth anyway, although he had always fancied that he saw other people having it.
Well, he mustn’t get morbid. It certainly hadn’t been a cheerful thing to come to his grandfather’s old farm and the little cemetery. Still he had to come and see that everything was all right before he went back into camp and would no longer be able to order his life as he pleased. He had to be sure he wanted to sell.
Then, with another deep sigh, he swung his car around the curve of the hill, jolting along over the stony way, and there, right ahead of him, was a car standing with its hood open and a girl in front of it looking anxiously toward him. Fool girl getting in his way! He almost ran over her! Why did girls always have to get in the way? This was no road for a girl to be on anyway, a cattle path! How did she get here?
He ground on his brakes and came to an abrupt halt before her.
"I beg your pardon," he said politely. "Are you having engine trouble?"
"Yes, but I don’t know what it is." The girl lifted her very blue eyes apologetically, and instantly he wondered where he had seen those eyes before. Yet of course that was absurd. He didn’t have much to do with girls, especially not out here in the country. He’d never had anything to do with girls, even in school, when he lived on Crimson Mountain. He was too busy studying and working. It must be something in his subconscious memory that was brought to him by the look in that girl’s eyes.
These thoughts were vaguely passing through his mind as he sprang, annoyed, from his car and went to investigate the other one. What a nuisance it was to be interrupted at this point in his journey, when he had only just so much time and quite a good many things he wanted to do before he went on his way back to camp to meet whatever was about to be the next scene in his life.
Laurel Sheridan had turned from the highway several miles back into a wooded road that she thought was the shortcut around the high hill that was familiarly known in that vicinity as Crimson Mountain because of its gorgeous color in the autumn. But Laurel did not choose that road for its beauty, although it was glowing and lovely. She was in a hurry. She was going to be late for an appointment, and she was worried. She thought she remembered that this road was supposed to be the shortcut to Carrollton. But it didn’t seem to be so short. It certainly was farther than she remembered. Could she have made a mistake? It wasn’t a very good road either, but she had come so far now she couldn’t turn back. Oh, this must be right.
So, frantically she stepped on the gas and mounted the hill, surprised at the sharp turn to the right that the road took when it ought to have turned left. She glanced at the clock in the car, calculating whether she could possibly get to that high school before it was entirely too late for her purpose.
She was two-thirds of the way up the hill, and beginning to count the distance ahead and discount time, when suddenly her car began to buck like a balky horse, and then it stopped dead!
She cast an annoyed glance at her dial. She couldn’t be out of gas, could she? Horrors! With no filling station probably till she got to the foot of the mountain on the other side. She seemed to be all turned around. Which way was Carrollton, anyway? She certainly must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Oh, it couldn’t be her gas was out! And she was still going up. Oh, if she could only make the top of the hill, perhaps she could coast down safely and make a filling station. In vain she tried to start the car again, yet the dial showed a little gas. What a fool she had been to take this road, with no place to get help if she had trouble. This couldn’t be the old shortcut across Crimson Mountain. She hadn’t had any doubt when she turned into the dirt road. It had seemed just as she remembered it, but now as she gave a quick look around, somehow it didn’t seem so familiar. She must have made a mistake. She tried to think back to the days of her little girlhood when her class had been brought into the woods for a picnic one day. What a happy time they’d had, and how she had always looked wistfully toward that dirt road into which their cars had turned that day to bring them to the lovely woods on the top of old Crimson. The look of that rough dirt road had always held a charm for her all that next winter after the picnic, whenever they drove down the highway. To tell the truth, that was the main reason why she had turned into it to-day, although she had heard it was a shorter way, and she was in a hurry. After all, it was nearly five years since she had been in this region, and there might have been two roads. She had passed one about a quarter of a mile before she reached this one. But it had seemed to her too fine a road to lead to the old picnic place. She was positive that the picnic road of old had been a dirt road, and that first road had been paved. But of course it might have been improved since early days. Well, what should she do now? If she could only get her engine going, perhaps she could turn around and go back. Take that other road. Wouldn’t that be best?
But try as she would, she could not make her engine speak, and she drew an impatient sigh as she got out of her car and walked to the front. She was afraid of that hood. She had never succeeded in getting it open. The car had always been kept in order for her by the man at the garage, but now there was no one but herself to depend on. She hadn’t any idea what she was going to do when she got the hood open, but that was what all men did first when anything was the matter with a car—they opened the hood. So she struggled to open it and throw it back nonchalantly as she had seen the men in the filling stations do. But struggle as she might, that hood refused to open. Till suddenly the handle she held gave a lurch, and up it came! At least it came up about eight inches and then lurched back again and seemed to settle down harder than ever.
But Laurel was not a girl to give up easily, and she was becoming more and more conscious of that school committee she had promised to meet, where she was going to apply for a job. So she went at the matter more vigorously this time and finally managed to swing up that hood and anchor it. She cast a troubled glance inside that mysterious engine, but nothing came of it. She had never had experience in machinery of any sort, and none of those pipes and tubes and screws made sense to her. For the first time, it occurred to her as strange that anyone could have thought out and made a thing so complicated and that, being made, it could manage to carry people around the country. Before this she had always taken cars for granted and thought nothing about them.
And so, having walked all about that engine and studied each part carefully without getting any light, she straightened up and stood there, trying to think what she should do next. Was it thinkable that she could walk down to the village and send somebody back from a filling station or garage after her car? She hadn’t the slightest idea how far it would be, if indeed she was on the right road to Carrollton.
Then suddenly she heard the sound of a swiftly coming car. It was up around