The Man with Agate Eyes

These were not peasants, these farmers. Nor, she learned, were they the
"hicks" of humor. She could never again encounter without fiery
resentment the Broadway peddler's faith that farmers invariably say
"Waal, by heck." For she had spent an hour talking to one Dakota farmer,
genial-eyed, quiet of speech. He had explained the relation of alfalfa
to soil-chemistry; had spoken of his daughter, who taught economics in a
state university; and asked Mr. Boltwood how turbines were hitched up on
liners.

In fact, Claire learned that there may be an almost tolerable state of
existence without gardenias or the news about the latest Parisian
imagists.

She dropped suddenly from the vast, smooth-swelling miles of wheatland
into the tortured marvels of the Bad Lands, and the road twisted in the
shadow of flying buttresses and the terraced tombs of maharajas. While
she tried to pick her way through a herd of wild, arroyo-bred cattle,
she forgot her maneuvering as she was startled by the stabbing scarlet
of a column of rock marking the place where for months deep beds of
lignite had burned.

Claire had often given lifts to tramping harvesters and even hoboes
along the road; had enjoyed the sight of their duffle-bags stuck up
between the sleek fenders and the hood, and their talk about people and
crops along the road, as they hung on the running-board. In the country
of long hillslopes and sentinel buttes between the Dakota Bad Lands and
Miles City she stopped to shout to a man whose plodding heavy back
looked fagged, "Want a ride?"