_ CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's
go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of
the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's
haggish voice:
. . .did too, and there's no use your denying it
no you don't, you march yourself right straight out
of the house. . .never in my life heard of such. . .
never had nobody talk to me like. . .walk in the ways
of sin and nastiness. . .leave your clothes here, and
heaven knows that's more than you deserve. . .any of
your lip or I'll call the policeman."
The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch,
nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her
confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs.
Bogart's God.
"Another row with Cy," Carol inferred.
She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively
wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard
steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern
Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her
head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery
arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl:
"And don't you dare show your face on this block again.
You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has
been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict
me----"
Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into
the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away.
By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be
distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher
Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then
the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts.
The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well?
how's the good neighbor?"
The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the
most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering:
"You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I
could go through the awful scenes of this day--and the
impudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be
cut out----"
"Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's
the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell
us about it."
"I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote
myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven
knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town
against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks
simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard
them---- And forcing herself in here to get in with you and
Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank
heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any
more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to
think what she may have done already, even if some of us
that understand and know about things----"
"Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?"
"She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not
pleasantly.
"Huh?"
Kennicott was incredulous.
"I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and
thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she
could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are
my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell
you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as
respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't stick by the
good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the
Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having
a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in
you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the
transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may
be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom
--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs
every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen,
and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she
care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly
nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out
of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings
and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk----"
Before they got her story she had five more minutes of
obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high
tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story
was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs.
Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned.
Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone
to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the
admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance
Cy had kissed Fern--she confessed that. Cy had obtained a
pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had
got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern
herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's overcoat--
which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had
become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited
him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch.
Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart.
When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or
twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an
air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes
he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't
ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses:
the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing
pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that
ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen
into the hands of a "designing woman."
"What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with
him?" insisted Carol.
Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning,
when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed
that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his
own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried
to deny it.
"Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the
impudence to say to me, `What purpose could I have in wanting
the filthy pup to get drunk?' That's just what she called
him--pup. `I'll have no such nasty language in my house,'
I says, `and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's
eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a
teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse
'n any street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I
wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think
that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. `Purpose?'
I says, `Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't
I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste
time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen
you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours,
trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da,
running along the street?' "
Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth,
but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could
tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the
drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her
power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country
places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging
dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful
conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott
who cried, "Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea
what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that
Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster."
"I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come
straight out and I says to her, `Did you or did you not taste the
whisky Cy had?' and she says, `I think I did take one sip--
Cy made me,' she said. She owned up to that much, so you
can imagine----"
"Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol.
"Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!"
wailed the outraged Puritan.
"Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took
a taste of whisky? I've done it myself!"
"That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What
do the Scriptures tell us? `Strong drink is a mocker'! But
that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her
own pupils."
"Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But
as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy
and probably a good many years younger in experience of
vice."
"That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt
him!
"The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town,
five years ago!"
Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was
hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves,
picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's
a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right.
Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young.
And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first
in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak
real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't
want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--
and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her
pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's
worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could
have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and
inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and
inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have
your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which
reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what
I said to the school-board."
"Have you been telling this story to the members of the
school-board?"
"I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives
I says to them, ` 'Tain't my affair to decide what you should
or should not do with your teachers,' I says, `and I ain't
presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just
want to know,' I says, `whether you're going to go on record
as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys
and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad
language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue
to but you know what I mean,' I says, `and if so, I'll just
see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told
Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he's a righteous
man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board
members. And the professor as much as admitted he was
suspicious of the Mullins woman himself."
II
Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than
Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart,
when she had gone.
Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather
improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, de-
manded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins
and Cy Bogart?"
"I'm sure it's a lie."
"Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the
falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general
delightfulness.
Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight
together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the
town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details,
panting to win importance by having details of their own to
add. How well they would make up for what they had been
afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not
been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the
barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly
they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it);
with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest
wit: "You can't tell ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!"
And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition
of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the
myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were
more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands,
not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and
fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you
snickering at? What facts have you? What are these unheard-
of sins you condemn so much--and like so well?"
No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor
Champ Perry.
Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest.
She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her
interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn't it because they
had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own
trail that they were howling at Fern?
III
Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls,
that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened
there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who
looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that
he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol
to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors
with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes,
streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed
red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a
sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness
at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures
on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice:
"Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the
right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing.
There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed
"Who is it? Go away!"
Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open
the door.
Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed
skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now
she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby
pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in
stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face
was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping.
"I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and
she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her
hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked
about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of
hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's
friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying
carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with
a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched
and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy
dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked
and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object
of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt
and rose cuspidor.
She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on
telling it.
She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing
to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs.
Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first
strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He
was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher
Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half
a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden
hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily
drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned
square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing,
under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled
and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks.
Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox
at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer
declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy
with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going
to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless
she did, he wouldn't return the bottle.
"I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him,"
moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever
take a drink?"
"I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This
contact with righteousness has about done me up!"
Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've
had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart
and Son---- Well, I didn't really touch that bottle--horrible
raw whisky--though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly.
The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and
the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter
up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And
I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young
farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got
uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two
drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing
me for even wanting wine?"
"My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god.
But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him. . .
though he slay us."
Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy
while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University
agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle;
he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself
offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She
insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and
jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And
to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss
you at a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need
of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped
her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke
before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and
tried to make love to her.
"I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him
away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like
a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared
to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home,
somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it
was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I
took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the
buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love
to me, and---- I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard.
And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby,
and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----
But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs.
Bogart was waiting up. . . .
"You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking
to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking,
`I've still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable.
I wonder if the livery man will be awake?' But I got through
somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to
my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying
things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about
me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while
I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think
I'll ever marry any man. And then today----
"She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen
to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his
headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing
was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going
around town boasting about his `conquest.' You understand--
oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't
see how I can face my school. They say country towns are
fine for bringing up boys in, but---- I can't believe this is
me, lying here and saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened
last night.
"Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last
night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the
mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and---- No matter. But
my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is,
I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got
out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when
I was fighting him off."
IV
Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol
told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly,
and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol
was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, "Dear, don't
speak so bitter about `pious' people. There's lots of sincere
practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ
Perrys."
"Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly
people in the churches to keep them going."
When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl;
I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure.
Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town,
except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was
a fool to go with him."
"But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?"
"N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the
entrancing horrors of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all
morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is
one hell-cat."
"Yes, you know how she is; so vicious."
"Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls
in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and
keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen
fourpenny nails. I remember one time----"
"Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't
you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite
charges?"
"Well, yes, you might say she did."
"But the school-board won't act on them?"
"Guess we'll more or less have to."
"But you'll exonerate Fern?"
"I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know
what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart
about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so;
and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for
morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid
there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any
of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a
stack of Bibles, but Still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins
wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team
when it went out of town to play other high schools, would
she!"
"Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?"
"Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam
sounded stubborn.
"Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and
hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out
with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the
world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you discharge her."
Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his
head, sighed, said nothing.
"Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't
you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?"
"No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just
decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's
unanimous or not."
"Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a
school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten
to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?"
Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained,
"Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board
meets."
And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission
"Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol
could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody,
the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the
school-board.
Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have
been referring to herself when he observed, "There's too much
license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of
sin is death--or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which
the priest said it remained in her mind.
She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed
to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky.
Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her
own self that the school-board would be just. She was less
sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard
Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, "She may be so
innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she
drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody
says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent!
Hee, hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put
in, "That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast
anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?"
"When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated.
Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol
hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a
mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed
to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do you folks think about
this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we
got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what
I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this
Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with
her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren!
Ha, ha. ha!"
"Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered.
He got Carol away before she was able to speak.
She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared
after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he
would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but
"Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend
to be mean."
She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of
the school-board were superior men.
It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board
had met at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss
Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news
to her. "We're not making any charges. We're just letting
her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask
her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I
could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you."
"But can't you see that the town will take this as proof
of the charges?"
"We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was
obviously finding it hard to be patient.
Fern left town that evening.
Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed
through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them
down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine
gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance
at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless,
listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something
unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule.
Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a
train. What would be the scene at the station when she
herself took departure?
She walked up-town behind two strangers.
One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench
that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat?
She's some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to
Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a
teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O boy!--high,
wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a
whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned
if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young
kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way,
and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say----"
The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a
common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman
and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale.
During it the other man laughed hoarsely.
Carol turned off on a side-street.
She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some
achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin,
Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the
shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they
accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to
go on.
It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of
which this was a part:
. . .& of course my family did not really believe the story but
as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just
lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at
a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story,
man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to
ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly.
Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May
marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he
makes me SCREAM.
Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me.
I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic
while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away
from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire
me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.--just five
months ago. _