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Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go. KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California.
The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed Town Lit Up Like Broadway Speech by Hon. James Blausser Come On You Twin Cities Our Hat Is In the Ring." The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder.
Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day.
But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want him here!
Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you won't jump on the band-wagon." Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this!
"And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve." Mr.
Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." "Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?" "Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!" She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr.
Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?" Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?"
But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser.
There's too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you " "Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!"
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