ll him
how Petey and I manufactured a real Wild West college--buildings,
Faculty, bad men and all--for one day only, for the benefit of an
Englishman who had gotten fifteen hundred miles inland without noticing
the general color scheme of the inhabitants.

We met this chap accidentally--a little favor of Providence, which had a
special pigeonhole for us in those days. Our team had been using the
Kiowa football team as a running track on their own field that
afternoon, and the score was about 105 to 0 when the timekeeper turned
off the massacre. Naturally all Siwash was happy. I will admit we were
too happy to be careful. About two hundred of us made the hundred-mile
trip home by local train that night, and I remember wondering, when the
boys dumped the stove off the rear platform and tied up the conductor in
his own bell-rope, if we weren't getting just a little bit indiscreet;
and when a college boy really wonders if he is getting indiscreet he is
generally doing something that will keep the grand jury busy for the
next few months.

I was in the last car, and had just finished telling "Prince" Hogboom
that if he poked any more window-lights out with his cane he would have
to finish the year under an assumed name, when Petey crawled over two
mobs of rough-housers and came up to me. He was seething with
indignation. It was breaking out all over him like a rash. Petey was
excitable anyway.

"What do you suppose I've found in the next car?" he said, fizzing like
an escape valve.

"Prof?" said I, getting alarmed.

"Naw," said Petey; "worse than that. A chap that has never heard of
Siwash. Asked me if it was a breakfast food. He's an Englishman. I'm
ag'in' the English." He stopped and began kicking a water tank around to
relieve himself.

"How did he get this far away from home?" I asked.

"He's traveling," snorted Petey; "traveling to improve his mind.
Hopeless job. He's one of those quarter-sawed old beef-eaters who stop
thinking as soon as they've got their education. He's the editor of a
missionary publication, he told me, and he is writing some articles on
Heathen America. Honest, it almost made me boil over when he asked me if
anything was being done to educate the aborigines out here."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Do?" said Petey. "Why, I answered his question, of course. I told him
he wasn't fifty miles from a college this minute, and he said, 'Oh, I
say now! Are you spoofing me?' What's 'spoofing'?"