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Show where we became hack drivers. We liked it at Mrs. Maxwell's, even though the boarders were faded like the house, and the talk at the table about two subjects only-President William McKinley and the depression. Including Pa and me, there were eight boarders at Mrs. Maxwell's-two of them nonsmilers. We had never met nonsmilers before, but when we did, we met two professionals. They were two old-lady sisters who never smiled because of the depression, and it had been going on for four years. Once I bet Pa they couldn' t smile if they wanted to because their faces were set like Portland Cement. He said maybe they were laughing on the inside. Pa told funny stories about himself, and most people laughed until they cried. One night at supper, he told about getting his tooth pulled on the ranch in Rock Springs, and Mrs. Maxwell laughed so hard she could not dish up the dessert. It went like this: Pa had suffered from a toothache for a long tine. So when a traveling dentist came around, Pa asked him to pull it. Pa sat down on a bench outside the bunkhouse, and the dentist went to work. He pulled and pulled at that tooth. Finally when it came out, Pa's head bounced back against the bunkhouse, and he was knocked out cold. When he came to, he looked up at the startled dentist. |
