no nonsense," and
Mrs. Dr. Rusk often had her for dinner.... Miss McDonald, fat and
slow-spoken and kind, prone to use the word "dearie," to read
Longfellow, and to have buttons off her shirt-waists, used on Carl a
feminine weapon more unfair than the robust sarcasm of Miss Muzzy. For
after irritating a self-respecting boy into rudeness by pawing his
soul with damp, puffy hands, she would weep. She was a kind, honest,
and reverent bovine. Carl sat under her supervision in the junior
room, with its hardwood and blackboards and plaster, high windows and
portraits of Washington and a President who was either Madison or
Monroe (no one ever remembered which). He hated the eternal school
smell of drinking-water pails and chalk and slates and varnish; he
loathed the blackboard erasers, white with crayon-dust; he found
inspiration only in the laboratory where "Prof" Larsen mistaught
physics and rebuked questions about the useless part of
chemistry--that is, the part that wasn't in their text-books.

As for literature, Ben Rusk persuaded him to try Captain Marryat and
Conan Doyle. Carl met Sherlock Holmes in a paper-bound book, during a
wait for flocks of mallards on the duck-pass, which was a little
temple of silver birches bare with November. He crouched down in his
canvas coat and rubber boots, gun across knees, and read for an hour
without moving. As he tramped home, into a vast Minnesota sunset like
a furnace of fantastic coals, past the garnet-tinged ice of lakes, he
kept his gun cocked and under his elbow, ready for the royal robber
who was dogging the personage of Baker Street.

He hunted much; distinguished himself in geometry and chemistry;
nearly flunked in Cicero and English; learned to play an
extraordinarily steady game of bottle pool at Eddie Klemm's.

And always Gertie Cowles, gently hesitant toward Ben Rusk's affection,
kept asking Carl why he didn't come to see her oftener, and play
tiddledywinks.

On the Friday morning before Christmas vacation, Carl and Ben Rusk
were cleaning up the chemical laboratory, its pine experiment-bench
and iron sink and rough floor. Bennie worried a rag in the sink with
the resigned manner of a man who, having sailed with purple banners
the sunset sea of tragedy, goes bravely on with a life gray and weary.

The town was excited. Gertie Cowles was giving a party, and she had
withdrawn her invitation to Eddie Klemm. Gertie was staying away from
high school, gracefully recovering