The Land of Billowing Clouds

The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed
of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded
to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and
shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small
abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed
stores.

Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days
were colored with the sun.

She had discovered, too, that she could adventure. No longer was she
haunted by the apprehension that had whispered to her as she had left
Minneapolis. She knew a thrill when she hailed--as though it were a
passing ship--an Illinois car across whose dust-caked back was a banner
"Chicago to the Yellowstone." She experienced a new sensation of common
humanness when, on a railway paralleling the wagon road for miles, the
engineer of a freight waved his hand to her, and tooted the whistle in
greeting.

Her father was easily tired, but he drowsed through the early afternoons
when a none-too-digestible small-town lunch was as lead within him.
Despite the beauty of the land and the joy of pushing on, they both had
things to endure.

After lunch, it was sometimes an agony to Claire to keep awake. Her eyes
felt greasy from the food, or smarted with the sun-glare. In the still
air, after the morning breeze had been burnt out, the heat from the
engine was a torment about her feet; and if there was another car ahead,
the trail of dust sifted into her throat. Unless there was traffic to
keep her awake, she nodded at the wheel; she was merely a part of a
machine that ran on without seeming to make any impression on the
prairie's endlessness.