ssionaries of business,
supplementing the taking of orders by telling merchants how to build up
trade, how to trim windows and treat customers like human beings; but
also that they, as much as the local ministers and doctors and teachers
and newspapermen, were the agents in spreading knowledge and justice. It
was they who showed the young men how to have their hair cut--and to
wash behind the ears and shave daily; they who encouraged villagers to
rise from scandal and gossip to a perception of the Great World, of
politics and sports, and some measure of art and science.

Claire, and indeed her father and Mr. Jeff Saxton as well, had vaguely
concluded that because drummers were always to be seen in soggy hotels
and badly connecting trains and the headachy waiting-rooms of stations,
they must like these places. Milt knew that the drummers were martyrs;
that for months of a trip, all the while thinking of the children back
home, they suffered from landlords and train schedules; that they were
Claire's best allies in fighting the Great American Frying Pan; that
they knew good things, and fought against the laziness and impositions
of people who "kept hotel" because they had failed as farmers; and that
when they did find a landlord who was cordial and efficient, they went
forth mightily advertising that glorious man. The traveling men, he
knew, were pioneers in spats.

Hence it was to the traveling men, not to supercilious tourists in
limousines, that Milt turned for suggestions as to how to perform the
miracle of changing from an ambitious boy into what Claire would
recognize as a charming man. He had not met enough traveling men at
Schoenstrom. They scooped up what little business there was, and escaped
from the Leipzig House to spend the night at St. Cloud or Sauk Centre.

In the larger towns in Minnesota and Dakota, after evening movies,
before slipping out to his roadside camp Milt inserted himself into a
circle of traveling men in large leather chairs, and ventured, "Saw a
Gomez-Dep with a New York license down the line today."

"Oh. You driving through?"

"Yes. Going to Seattle."

That distinguished Milt from the ordinary young-men-loafers, and he was
admitted as one of the assembly of men who traveled and saw things and
wondered about the ways of men. It was good talk he heard; too much of
hotels, and too many tight banal little phrases suggesting the solution
of all economic complexities by hanging "agitators,