cleared: it was a night of blazing and magnificent stars, set in the limitless velvet substance of the sky, burning with faint brilliance and without light over the immense, mysterious, and mournful-looking earth.
Twice, going out of town, his brother stopped, and both times with a kind of sudden indecisive after-thought. Once, when they had passed a little corner drug-store, he jammed the brakes on suddenly, bringing the car to such an abrupt and jolting halt that Eugene was flung forward violently against the wind-screen. He turned to him with a nervous and distracted air of indecision, saying:
“Do you f-f-f-fink you could go a dope?” (this was the word in common use for Coca Cola) “W-w-w-would you like a drink?” he said, with a comical thrusting movement of the head, a wild look in his eyes, a restless and stammering indecision and earnestness. The boy told him no, and after a worried and restless look of his flickering grey eyes, in the direction of the drug-store, he thrust his large flat foot into the clutch and started the car in motion again, with the same violent and jarring movement as when he had halted.
Again, on the very outposts of the town, where there was nothing but the dusty road, a few cheap frame-houses, sparely, flimsily, and carelessly built upon the breast of an immense and formless land, which seemed indifferent to them and with which they seemed to have no union, and with nothing but the road, the stars and the huge mysteries of the earth before them, his brother had halted with another jarring jolt, when they had flashed past a filling station where, so read a sign, soft drinks and barbecued sandwiches were for sale.
“How about a b-b-b-barbecued sandwich?” he demanded, looking at Eugene with a wild and glaring suddenness. “C-c-c-could you go one? Huh?”—he said, almost barking at him, with a comical thrusting movement of the head. But even before the boy could answer, and he saw the sullen and exasperated scowl upon his face, he thrust his fingers wildly through his hair, burst into a wild rich “whah-whah” of crazy laughter—a laughter that was all the more strange and astonishing because even as he laughed the taut and drawn tension of his face and nerves, and the frenzied unrest of his eyes, were terribly apparent—and then started the car in motion again with a jarring, grinding and convulsive jolt. And Luke could not have said why he had halted at these last two outposts of the town—the drug-store and the filling station—but certainly the impulse that had made him halt had little to do with food or drink, for neither
