Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Ladies and Gentlemen

All the morning and all the afternoon until he left his office he was receiving the congratulations of associates and well-wishers upon Miss Bracken’s engagement and likewise upon his own decision to run for Senator. His desk telephone was jingling constantly. He stopped in at his club on the way home – the Metropolis Club it was, and the most exclusive one in town – and there he held a sort of levee. Whole-hearted support was promised him by scores, literally. The most substantial men in the whole city gathered about him, endorsing him for the step he had taken and pledging themselves to work for him and predicting his easy nomination and his equally easy election. The state generally went Republican – not always, but three times out of four on an average. Under this barrage of applause he unbent somewhat, showing more warmth, more geniality, than he had shown anywhere for a good long while. He did not unbend too far, though, but just far enough.

The club cynic, an aged and petulant retired physician, watching the scene in the club library from his regular seat by the tall marble fireplace, remarked under his voice to the first deputy club cynic, who now bore him company and who would succeed him on his death:

“Haughty as hell, even now, ain’t he? Notice this, Ike – he’s not acknowledging the enthusiasm of that flock of bootlickers that are swarming around him yonder, he’s merely accepting it as his proper due. What does the man think he is anyhow – God Almighty?”

“Humph!” answered the deputy. “You rate our budding statesman too low. Down in that Calvinistic soul of his he may sometimes question the workings of the Divine Scheme, but you bet he never has questioned his own omnipotence – the derned money-changing pouter pigeon. Look at him, all reared back there with one hand on his heart and the other under his coat-tails – like a steel engraving of Daniel Webster!”

“Not on his heart, Ike,” corrected the chief cynic grimly; “merely on the place where his heart would be if he had any heart. He had one once, I guess, but from disuse it’s withered up and been absorbed into the system. Remember, don’t you, how just here the other week he clamped down on poor old Hank Needham and squeezed the last cent out of him? He’ll win, though, mark my words on it. He always has had his way and he’ll keep on having it. Lord, Lord, and I can remember when we used to send real men to Washington from this state – human he-men, not glorified dollar-grabbers always looking for the main chance. Given half a show, Hank Needham could have come back; now he’s flat busted and he’ll be dead in six months, or I miss my guess.”

These isolated two – the official crab and his understudy – were the only men in the room, barring club servants, who remained aloof from the circle surrounding the candidate. They bided on where they were, eyeing him from under their drooped eyelids when, at the end of a happy hour, he passed out, a strong, erect, soldierly man in his ripening fifties. Then, together, they both grunted eloquently.

In a fine glow of contentment Jerome Bracken walked to his house. He wanted the exercise, he wanted to be alone for a little while with his optimism.

He was almost home when a city hospital ambulance hurried past him, its gong clanging for passage in the traffic of early evening. Just after it got by he saw a white-coated interne and a policeman wrestling with somebody who seemed to be fastened down to a stretcher in the interior of the motor, and from that struggling somebody he heard delirious sobbing outcries in a voice that was feminine and yet almost too coarsened and thick to be feminine.

Vaguely it irked him that even for a passing moment this interruption should break in on his thoughts. But no untoward thing disturbed the household rhapsody that night. There, as at the office, the bell on the telephone kept ringing almost constantly, and, being answered, the telephone yielded only felicitating words from all and sundry who had called up.

A man who had no shadow of earthly doubt touching on his destinies slept that night in Jerome Bracken’s bed. And if he dreamed we may be well assured that his dreams were untroubled by specters of any who had besought him for mercy and had found it not. A conscience that is lapped in eider-down is nearly always an easy conscience.

It was the fifth day after the next day when, with no warning whatsoever, Jerome Bracken got smashed all to flinders. He was in his office at the rear of the bank going over the morning mail – it mostly was letters written by friendly partisans over the state, including one from the powerful national committeeman for the state – when without knocking, his lawyer, Mr. Richard Griffin, opened the door and walked in followed by his local political manager, who also happened to be the local political boss. The faces of both wore looks of a grave uneasiness, the manners of both were concerned and unhappy.

“Morning, gentlemen,” said Mr. Bracken. “What is pressing down on your minds this fine day?”

Yankee-fashion, Mr. Griffin answered the question by putting another.

“Bracken,” he said, “how long have you been knowing this woman, Queenie Sears?”

“What do you mean?” demanded Mr. Bracken sharply.

“What I say. How long have you known her? And how well?”

“I don’t understand you, Dick.” The other’s tone was angry. “And by what right do you assume – ”

“Bracken,” snapped Griffin sharply, “I’m here as a man who’s been your lifelong friend – you must know that. And Dorgan here has come with me in the same capacity – as a friend of yours. This thing is serious. It’s damned serious. It’s likely to be about the most serious thing that ever happened to you. I’ll repeat the question and I’m entitled to a fair, frank answer: How long have you been acquainted with Queenie Sears?”

In his irate bewilderment Mr. Bracken could think of but one plausible explanation for this incredible inquiry. He started up from his chair, his hands gripping into fists. He almost shouted it.

“Has that dirty, libelous, scandal-mongering rag of an afternoon paper down the street had the effrontery this early in the campaign to attempt to besmirch my character? If it has I’ll – ”

“Not yet!” For the first time the politician was taking a hand in the talk. “But it will – before sundown tonight. Catch a Democrat outfit passing up a bet like this! Sweet chance!” He looked toward the lawyer. “You better tell him, Griffin,” he said with a certain gloomy decision. “Then when you’re through I’ll have my little say-so.”

“Probably that would be best,” agreed Griffin resignedly. “Sit down, won’t you, Bracken? I’m going to hand you a pretty hard blow right in the face.”

His amazement growing, Mr. Bracken sat down. Through what painfully followed, the other two continued to stand.

“Bracken,” stated Griffin, “I’ll start at the beginning. Something like a week ago Queenie Sears was taken from her dive down on the river shore to the municipal infirmary. She had delirium tremens – was raving crazy. She’d had them before, it appears, but this attack was the last one she’ll ever have. Because it killed her – that and a weak heart and bad kidneys and a few other complications, so the doctors say. Anyhow, she’s dead. She died about an hour ago.

“Well, early this morning her mind cleared up for a little while. They told her she was going, which she probably knew for herself, and advised her to put her worldly affairs – if she had any – in order. It seems she had considerable worldly affairs to put in order, which was a surprise. It seems from what she said that she had upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all in gilt-edged securities, all tucked away in a safe-deposit box, and all of it, every red cent of it, coined from the blood and the sweat and the degradations of fallen women. No need for us to go into that now. God knows, enough people will be only too glad to go into it when the news leaks out!

“As I say, they told her at the hospital that she was dying. So she asked for a lawyer and they got one – a young fellow named Dean that’s lately opened up an office. And he came and she made her will and it was signed in the presence of witnesses and will be offered for probate without delay. Trust some of our friends of the opposition to attend promptly to that detail. And, Bracken – take it steady, man – Bracken, she left every last miserable cent of that foul, tainted one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to you.”

“What!” The cry issued from Bracken’s throat in a gulping shriek.

“I’m saying she left it all to you. I’ve just seen the will. So has Dorgan. I sent for him as soon as the word reached me about half an hour ago and we went together and read the infernal thing. It says – I can almost quote it verbatim – that she’s leaving it to you because for thirty-six years you’ve been her best friend and really her only friend and her one disinterested adviser. And furthermore because – with almost her dying breath she said it – because you were solely instrumental in helping her to save and preserve her earnings… God, but that’s been hard! Now then, Dorgan, it’s your turn to speak.”

So Dorgan spoke, but briefly. Five minutes later, from the door on the point of departure, he was repeating with patience, in almost the soothing parental tone one might use to an ailing and unreasonable child, what already he had said at least twice over to that stricken figure slumped in the swivel chair at the big flat desk.

“Sure,” he was saying, “I’ll believe you, and Griffin here, he’ll believe you – ain’t he just promised you he would? – and there’s maybe five or six others’ll believe you – but who else is goin’ to take your word against what it says in black and white on that paper? And her lookin’ into the open grave when she told ’em to set it down? Nope, Bracken, you’re through, and it’s only a mercy to you that I’m comin’ here to be the first one to tell you you are. You can explain till you’re black in the face and you can refuse to touch that dough till the end of time, or you can give it to charity – if you’re lucky enough to find a charity that’ll take it – but, Bracken, it’s been hung around your neck like a grindstone and it was a dead woman’s hands that hung it there and it makes you altogether too heavy a load for any political organization to carry – you see that yourself, don’t you? And so, Bracken, you’re through!”

But to Bracken’s ears now the words came dimly, meaning little. Where he was huddled, he foresaw as with an eye for prophecy things coming to pass much as they truly did come to pass. He saw his wife – how well he knew that lukewarm lady who was not lukewarm in her animosities nor yet in her suspicions! – saw her closing a door of enduring contempt forever between them; he saw the breaking off of his daughter’s engagement to that young Scopes, who was the third bearer of an honored name, and his daughter despising him as the cause for her humiliation and her wrecked happiness; he saw himself thrown out of his church, thrown out of his bank, thrown out of all those pleasant concerns in which he had joyed and from which he had rendered the sweet savors of achievement and of creation. He saw himself being cut, being ignored, by those who had been glad to kowtow before him for his favor, being elbowed aside as though he were a thing unclean and leprous.

He heard, not Dorgan passing a compassionate but relentless sentence on him and his dearest of all hopes, but rather he seemed to hear the scornful laughter of unregenerate elderly libertines, rejoicing at the downfall of an offending brother exposed at his secret sins; and he seemed to hear derisive voices speaking – “Walking so straight up he reared backwards, and all the time – ” “Well, well, well, the church is certainly the place for a hypocrite to hide himself in, ain’t it?” “Acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but now just look at him!” “His life was an open book till they found out where the dark pages were stuck together, he, he, he!” Thus and so he heard the scoffing voices speaking. He heard aright too, and as his head went down into his hands, he tasted in anticipation a draft too bitter for human strength to bear.

Griffin was another who did not hear the third repetition of Dorgan’s judgment. He had gone on ahead like a man anxious to quit a noisome sick-room and to one of the assistant cashiers in the outer office he was saying: “I advise you to get your chief to go home and lie down awhile. It might also be a good idea to call up his family doctor and get him to drop over here right away. From the looks of him, Mr. Bracken’s not a well man. He’s had a shock – a profound shock. His nerves might give way, I’d say, any minute. I’m afraid he’s in for a very, very hard time!”

Peace on Earth

This Christmas was going to be different. So far as Mr. and Mrs. Bugbee were concerned the Christmas before had been a total failure, disillusioning, disappointing, fraught with heart-burnings. But this coming one – well, just let everybody wait and see. They’d show them.

“It’s going to be so dog-goned different you’d be surprised!” said Mr. Bugbee. He said it after the plan had taken on shape and substance and, so saying, raised a hand in the manner of a man who plights a solemn troth.

But first the plan had to be born. It was born on a day in October when Mr. Bugbee came into the living-room of their light-housekeeping apartment on West Ninth Street just around the corner from Washington Square. The living-room was done in Early Byzantine or something – a connoisseur would know, probably – and Mrs. Bugbee was dressed to match the furnishings. She was pretty, though. Her friends said she reminded them of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna, which either was or was not a compliment dependent on what privately the speaker thought about the Pre-Raphaelite school. Still, most of her friends liked it, being themselves expertly artistic. She had the tea things out – the hammered Russian set. This was her customary afternoon for receiving and presently there would be people dropping in. She lifted her nose and sniffed.

“Whew!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? You smell like a rancid peppermint lozenge.”

“Been down in the storeroom in the basement getting out my winter suits,” he said. “Messy job. I broke up a party.”

“Whose?” she asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. Moth were celebrating their woolen wedding,” he explained. “They furnished the guests and I did the catering. You ought to see that heavy sweater of mine. It’s not heavy any more. I’m going to write a chapter to be added to that sterling work ‘Advice to an Expectant Moth-er.’”

“Oh dear!” she said. “That’s the trouble with living in one of these old converted houses.”

“This one has backslid,” he interjected. “Insectivorous, I call it. There were enough roaches down there to last a reasonable frugal roach-collector for at least five years. Any entomologist could have enjoyed himself for a week just classifying species.”

“And I fairly saturated your clothes with that spraying stuff before I packed them away,” she lamented. “And as for camphor balls – well, if I used up one camphor ball I used ten pounds.”

“You must have been a poor marksman. So far as I can judge you never hit a single one of ’em. And so all summer, while we flitted from place to place, gay butterflies of fashion that we are, they’ve been down there intent on family duties, multiplying and replenishing my flannel underwear, as the Scriptures so aptly put it. Devoted little creatures, moths! They have their faults but they have their domestic virtues, too. I wish they didn’t have so much of my golf sweater. It looked like drawn-work.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Gave it back to them. All or none – that’s my motto. But I piled the rest of the duds on my bed. By prompt relief work much of it may be salvaged.”

“Then for heaven’s sake close the door before I choke.”

He closed the door and came and sat down near her and lighted a cigarette. He wore the conventional flowing Windsor tie to prove how unconventional he was. But he did not wear the velveteen jacket; he drew the line there, having a sense of humor. Nor were his trousers baggy and unpressed. They were unbagged and impressive. Mr. Bugbee was a writer, also a painter. He was always getting ready to write something important and then at the last minute deciding to paint instead, or the other way around. What between being so clever at the two crafts he rarely prosecuted either.

But then as regards finances this pair did not have to worry. There was money on both sides, which among our native bohemians is a rare coincidence. He had inherited some and Mrs. Bugbee had inherited a good deal. So they could gratify a taste for period furniture and practice their small philanthropies and generally make a pleasant thing of living this life without the necessity of stinting.

It was agreed that they had such happy names – names to match their natures. His was Clement and hers was Felicia. It was as if, infants at the baptismal font though they were, they had been christened and at the same time destined for each other. Persons who knew them remarked this. Persons also made a play on their last name. While these twain were buzzing about enjoying themselves, their intimates often called them the Busy Bugbees. But when an idealistic impulse swept them off their feet, as occasionally it did, the first syllable was the one that was accented. It was really a trick name and provided some small entertainment for light-hearted members of the favored circle in which the couple mainly moved. It doesn’t take much to amuse some people.

“Just to think!” mused Mrs. Bugbee. “It seems only a week or two ago since we were wondering where we’d go to spend the summer. Time certainly does fly.”

“And what a small world it is,” amended Mr. Bugbee. “Why, we were sitting right here in this room when that subject first came up and, lo and behold, only five short months afterward we meet again on the very same spot. Where do they get that stuff about a fellow so rarely running into an old friend in New York?”

“You’d better save that cheap wit of yours for somebody who’ll appreciate it,” said Mrs. Bugbee, but she smiled an indulgent wifely smile as she said it. “Yes, indeed, time does fly! And here winter is almost upon us.” She lifted her voice and trilled a quotation: “‘And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?’” Mrs. Bugbee loved to sing. She sang rather well, too. About once in so often she thought seriously of taking up grand opera. Something always happened, though. With the Bugbees something always did.

“Don’t you be worrying your head about him,” said Mr. Bugbee. “Being a wise old bird, the robin will be down in Georgia dragging those long stretchy worms out of the ground. I wish they’d put as good a grade of rubber into elastic garters as they do into those Southern worms. It’s what we’ll be doing ourselves, poor things, that gives me pause.”

“First thing anybody knows Thanksgiving will be here.” She went on as though she had not heard him. “And then right away I’ll have to begin thinking about Christmas. Oh dear!” She finished with a sigh.

“Damn Christmas!” Mr. Bugbee was fervent.

“Why, Clem Bugbee, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

So he altered it: “Well, then, damn the kind of Christmas they have in this vast and presumably intellectual city! Giving other people things they don’t want that cost more money than you can afford to spend, because they are going to give you things you don’t want that cost more than they can afford to spend. Every retail shop turned into a madhouse with the inmates all running wild. Handing out money on all sides to people who hate you because it’s not more and you hating them right back because you’re being held up this way. Everybody and everything going stark raving crazy on Christmas Eve. Nervous prostrations. Jams in the streets. Sordidness, greed, ostentation, foolish extravagance. Postmen and clerks and expressmen dying on their feet. Truck-drivers spilling the sort of language that’s still regarded as improper except when spoken on the stage. Then it becomes realism, but the truck-driver, not being artistic but just a poor overworked slob of a vulgarian, he’s maybe arrested for using obscenity.

“Christmas Day, and you go around with ‘Merry Christmas’ on your lips and murder in your heart. And drink egg-nogs made out of amateur whisky. And eat too much. And go to fool parties where you’re bored stiff. Then the bills piling in. And the worthless junk piling up around the flat. And everything. Do I seem bitter? I do? Well, I am!”

“It’s easy enough to talk – goodness knows every rational human being deplores the commercialism and the – the mercenaryism – ”

“Where did you get that word?”

“Made it up. It’s a good word and it’s mine and I like it. And don’t interrupt. As I was saying, we all deplore the mercenaryism and the materialism and the senseless display that’s crept into Christmas, and a lot of people spout about it just as you’re doing, but nobody does anything to try to reform it. At least nobody has since they started the custom of sending Christmas cards instead of gifts. But that was a mistake; it’s been overdone into an evil. There’s a passion to see who can buy the most expensive cards; and you spend weeks beforehand making up the lists and addressing the envelops, and the cards cost as much as the presents used to cost and make ever so much more bother getting them out. Look at what happened to us last Christmas! Look at what’s sure to happen this Christmas! And all you do is stand there – sit there, I mean – and spout at me as though I were to blame. Suggest a way out, why don’t you? I’d be only too delighted if you would.”

“I will,” proclaimed the challenged party. He thought hard. “We’ll run away from it – that’s what we’ll do.”

“Where do we run?”

“That’s a mere detail. I’m working out the main project. In advance we’ll circulate the word that we’re escaping from the civilized brand of Christmas; that on December twenty-fifth we’re going to be far, far beyond the reach of long-distance telephones, telegraph lines, wireless, radio, mental telepathy, rural free delivery routes, janitors with their paws out for ten-dollar bills and other well-wishers; that we’re not going to send any presents to our well-to-do friends and are not expecting any from them; that we’re not even figuring on mailing out a single, solitary, dad-busted greetings card. There’s plenty of time ahead of us for putting the campaign through. We’ll remember our immediate relatives and your pet charities and any worth-while dependents we can think of. And then we’ll just dust out and forget to leave any forwarding address.”

“We could try Florida again,” suggested Mrs. Bugbee.

“The land of the sap and the sapodilla – we will not! What’s Florida now except New York with a pair of white duck pants on?”

“Well, the climate there is – ”

“It is not! It’s all cluttered up with real-estate agents, the climate is. Besides I never could see the advantages of traveling eighteen hundred miles in mid-winter to get into the same kind of weather that you travel eighteen hundred miles in midsummer to get out of.”

“Well, then, we might run up to Lake Placid or the Berkshires. Of course it’ll be too early at either place for the regular season, but I suppose there’ll be a few people we know – ”

“You don’t grasp the big theory at all. This is not to be an excursion, it’s an exploring expedition. We’re not a couple of tourists out for winter sports and chilblains on our toes. We’re pioneers. We’re going forth to rediscover the old Christmas spirit that’s sane and simple and friendly. If there is a neighborhood left anywhere in this country where the children still believe in Santa Claus we’re going to find it. And we’ll bring the word back when we come home and next year thousands of others will follow our examples, and generations yet unborn will rise up and bless us as benefactors of the human race. I shouldn’t be surprised if they put up monuments to us in the market-place.”

“You might as well be serious about it. And not quite so oratorical.”

“I am serious about it – I was never more serious in my life. Beneath this care-free exterior a great and palpitating but practical idea has sprouted to life.”

“Well, since you’re so practical, kindly sprout the name of the spot where we’re to spend Christmas. I’m perfectly willing to try anything once, even against my better judgment, but you can’t expect me to get on a train with you without at least a general notion as to the name of the station where we get off.”

Mr. Bugbee’s brow furrowed; then magically it unwrinkled. “I have it!” he said. “We’ll take the Rousseau cottage up at Pleasant Cove. The Rousseaus are sailing next Tuesday for Europe to be gone until spring. Only yesterday Rousseau offered me the use of his camp any time I wanted it and for as long as I pleased. I’ll see him tomorrow and ask him to notify his caretaker that we’ll be along about the second week in December.”

“But it’s eight miles from the railroad.” Her tone was dubious.

“So much the better. I wish it was eighty miles from one.”

“And right in the middle of the mountains.”

“You bet it is. I want to be right in the heart of the everlasting peaks. I hope to get snowed in. I crave an old-fashioned white Christmas. I’m fed up on these spangled green, blue, red, pink, purple and blind ones. I want to mingle with hardy kindly souls who have absorbed within them the majesty and the nobility of their own towering hills. I want to meet a few of the real rugged American types once more. I’m weary of these foreigners you see in the subway reading newspapers which seem to be made up exclusively of typographical errors. I yearn to hear the idioms of my native tongue spoken. You remember that gorgeous week we spent with the Rousseaus six summers ago, or was it seven? Anyhow you must remember it – those quaint ruralists, those straightforward sturdy honest old mountaineer types, those characters redolent of the soil, those laughing rosy-cheeked children?”

“I seem to recall that some of them were sallow, not to say sickly-looking.”

“December’s winds will remedy that. December’s eager winds will – ”

“How about servants? We’ll need somebody surely. And I doubt whether Emile and Eva would be willing to go.”

“Gladly would I leave behind those two whom you have heard me, in sportive moments, refer to as our Dull Domestic Finnish. Being aliens, they wouldn’t match the surroundings. No doubt some sturdy country lass would be glad to serve us.” Mr. Bugbee reverted again to the elocutionary. “We’ll throw ourselves into the Yuletide joy of the community. We’ll get up a Christmas tree. We’ll hang up our stockings. We’ll finance a holiday festival for the grown folks – it won’t cost much. You can organize a band of singers and teach them carols and Christmas waits. We’ll live and revel, woman, I tell you we’ll live.”

Before his persuasive eloquence the lingering traces of Mrs. Bugbee’s misgivings melted away. Herself, within the hour, she called up Mrs. Rousseau to inquire regarding housekeeping details in the bungalow on the slopes behind Pleasant Cove.

Their train got in at six-ten A. M., which in December is generally regarded as being very A. M. indeed. But the Bugbees didn’t much mind having to quit their berths at five-thirty. The sunrise repaid them. There was an eastern heaven that shimmered with alternating, merging, flowing bands of tender pinks and tenderer greens. Mrs. Bugbee said right off it reminded her of changeable silk. Mr. Bugbee said it reminded him of stewed rhubarb. He also said that when he reflected on the pleasing prospect that by coming up here they would miss the Baxters’ annual costume ball on Christmas night he felt like halting about once in so often and giving three rousing cheers.

He furthermore said he could do with a little breakfast. He did with a very little. Mrs. Bugbee had brought along a vacuum bottle of coffee and four sandwiches but they were rather small – sandwiches of the pattern usually described in cook-books as dainty; and the stopper of the vacuum bottle could not have been quite air-tight, for the coffee had turned lukewarm during the night.

They emerged from the smelly sleeper into a nipping morning. There was snow on the ground, not a great deal of snow but enough. The two adventurers rather had counted on a sleigh-ride through the woods but here they suffered a disappointment. A muffled figure of a man clunked in rubber boots toward them from the platform of the locked-up station. This was the only person in sight. The stranger introduced himself with a broad yawn and a fine outgushing of frosty breath.

“Name’s Talbot,” he stated when the yawn had run its course. “I look after the Rousseau camp winters. Boss writ me word to meet you folks. Huh, got quite a jag of baggage, ain’t you? I could go round the world twice’t with less than that. Well, let’s be joggin’.”

He relieved Mrs. Bugbee of her two hand-bags and led the way to a bespattered flivver which crouched apprehensively in a maze of frozen wheel tracks behind the shuttered building, Mr. Bugbee following with a heavy suitcase in either hand and a blanket-roll swung over his shoulder by its strap.

“Likely you’ll be a mite crowded, but that’s your own fault, fetchin’ so much dunnage with you,” stated their guide. “You two had better ride in the back there and hold a couple of them biggest grips on your laps. I guess I kin wedge the rest of it into the front seat alongside of me. All set?” he asked. “Let’s move then.”

The car slewed on its tires, then settled deeply into the frozen ruts, jouncing and jerking.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier traveling with a sleigh?” inquired Mr. Bugbee, speaking rather brokenly between jolts.

“Don’t do much sleddin’ in this country any more – not till later, anyway, when the weather gits set,” vouchsafed Mr. Talbot. “A thaw’s liable to come and then where would you be with your sled runners? Besides, purty near ever’body up here keeps an ottermobile. Set tight!” he commanded. “We’re about to hit a rough place.”