He pulled up before the mobile town’s clinic.
Doc Barnes was sitting in a folding chair out front talking to his nurse who was also relaxed in the cool of the evening.
Ferd muttered, “This head is killing me. I’ll go over to my own place. See you later, Bat.” He stumbled from the vehicle, head still in hands, and staggered away.
II
New Woodstock had crossed the Rio Grande at McAllen and passed through the Mexican city of Reynosa.
There had been two fairly major sites on the American side of the border with excellent facilities for as many as ten thousand homes apiece but Bat Hardin and the executive committee had checked to find that the next nearest site was at Linares, a full 254 kilometers to the southwest. They wanted to push on through and avoid the necessity of setting up for the night at some second class or emergency site where there would be inadequate supply facilities and other shortcomings. There would be enough of that when they got down into Central America and beyond.
The committee had handled all the required border formalities the day before so that there was nothing to hold them up. Bat Hardin leading, as usual, they strung out along the highway, some füve hundred homes strong, with the auxiliary vehicles spaced periodically between them. Most of the homes were drawn by fairly modern electro-steamers but when you were dealing with even five hundred mobile homes you could hardly expect very often to get through one whole day without some needed minor repairs.
The stretch from Reynosa to the little town of China, where they branched off onto a side road so as to avoid the large city, of Monterrey, was excellent enough. Above ground, of course, and not automated as would have been an American road of this size, but adequate. Even the Pan American Highway was far from completely automated and this was not the Pan American Highway as yet. They’d join that further south.