The villager moved closer.
"Gas ?" "Yep." The young man stretched again.

"Fill up the tank--and better give me half a gallon of oil." Then he turned away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as a knife-thrust, between the region where trees may grow and snows may hide beneath their protecting boughs and the desolate, barren, rocky, forbidding waste of "timber line." Young he was, almost boyish; yet counterbalancing this was a seriousness of expression that almost approached somberness as he stood waiting until his machine should be made ready for the continuance of his journey.

The eyes were dark and lustrous with something that closely approached sorrow, the lips had a tightness about them which gave evidence of the pressure of suffering, all forming an expression which seemed to come upon him unaware, a hidden thing ever waiting for the chance to rise uppermost and assume command.

But in a flash it was gone, and boyish again, he had turned, laughing, to survey the gas tender.
"Did you speak ?" he asked, the dark eyes twinkling.

The villager was in front of the machine, staring at the plate of the radiator and scratching his head.
"I was just sayin' I never seed that kind o' car before.