k at
it forgivingly; so I would never, never want to see it again, and I
never want to hear the awful word 'blowout' spoken."

"Then forget it," Joe advised.

And Jerry forgot it.

But for Joe Thomson the seasons held another story. Down the Sage Brush,
fall and spring, great steam tractors furrowed the shifting sands of the
blowout, until slowly broom-corn and other coarse plants were coaxing a
thin soil deposit that spread northward from the south edge of the
sand-line. Little attention was paid to these efforts by the few farmer
folk who supposed that Joe was backing it, for they were all a busy
people, and the movement was too futile to be considered, anyhow.

Late in the summer of her first season in New Eden, affairs came to a
head suddenly. Three years before, Junius Brutus Ponk's well-meant
warning to Jerry to be on her guard against Stellar Bahrr's
mischief-making had not been without cause or results. Before the
opening of the school year, beginning with the Lenwells as a go-between,
percolating up through families where fall sewing was in progress, on to
the Macphersons and their closest friends, the impression grew toward
fact that Jerry was a sort of adventuress who had foisted herself upon
the Macphersons and had befuddled the brain of the vain little
hotel-keeper, who had overruled the other members of the school board
and forced her into a good place in the high school, although she was
without experience or knowledge of the branch to which she was elected.
And then she met young men in the cemetery and rode in Ponk's car over
the country alone.

One of the easy acts of the average, and super-average, mortal is to
respect a criticism made upon a fellow-mortal--doing it most generally
with no conscious malevolence, prompted largely by the common human
desire to be the bearer of new discoveries.

New Eden was no worse than the average little town at any point of the
compass. It took Stellar Bahrr at her par value, listened, laughed, and
declared it disbelieved her stories--and mainly in that spirit repeated
them, but in any spirit always repeated them. When the reports of Jerry
had gone to the farthest corners of town they came at last to the office
of York Macpherson. And it was Ponk himself who brought them, with some
unprintable language and violent denunciations of certain females who
were deadlier, he declared, than any males, even blackmails. York
forgave the atrocious pun because of the right