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By Root 14500 0

women do to make your flesh crawl. When she leaned over, the light hit her hair to show up the auburn luster lurking in the brown which the operator of the recently established Mason City Beauty Shoppe hadn’t been entirely able to burn out with the curling tongs when she gave the marcel treatment. It was too bad about Lucy’s hair even if the luster was still there. She was still girlish then, about twenty-five but not looking it, with a nice little waist coming straight up out of the satisfactory and unmeager hips and a nice little pair of ankles crossed in front of the chair, and her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep-brown eyes, the kind that makes you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of the old homestead. But her hair was cut off at about neck level and marcelled the way they did it back then, which was a shame because the face she had was the kind that demanded to be framed by a wealth of long and lustrous-dusky tresses tangled on the snow-white pillow. She must have had plenty of hair, too, before the massacre.

“But I don’t care,” she said, and lifted her head out of the light. I don’t want to teach in a schoolhouse they build just so somebody can steal some money. And Willie doesn’t want to be Treasurer either, if he has to associate with those dishonest people.”

“I’m going to run,” Willie said glumly. “They can’t keep me from running.”

“You can give a lot more time to studying your law books,” she said to him, “when you aren’t in town all the time.”

“I’m going to run,” he repeated, and jerked his head with that sharp motion he had to get the lock of hair out of his eyes. “I’m going to run,” he repeated again, as though he weren’t talking to Lucy, or to me, but to the wide sweet air or God-Almighty, “if I don’t get a single God-damned vote.”

Well, he did run when the time came, and he got more than one vote, but not many more, and Mr. Dolph Pillsbury and his pals won that round. The fellow who was elected against Willie that fall didn’t hang his hat up in the office before he had signed the check for the advance payment to J. H. Moore, and J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The story, as Willie told it, was this: The Jeffers Construction Company had low bid at one hundred and forty-two thousand. But there were two more bids in between the Jeffers bid and the Moore bid, which was one hundred and sixty-five thousand and a lot of nickels and dimes. But when Willie kicked about the Moore business, Pillsbury started the nigger business. Jeffers was a big-time contractor, from the south of the state, and he used a lot of Negro bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters in some of his crews. Pillsbury started howling that Jeffers would bring in a lot of Negroes–and Mason County, as I said, is red-neck country–and worse, some of the Negroes would be getting better pay, being skilled laborers, than the men he would pick up around Manson City for some of the work. Pillsbury kept the pot boiling.

He kept it boiling so well that the public overlooked the fact that there were two bids in between Jeffers and Moore and the fact that Pillsbury had a brother-in-law who had a brickkiln in which Moore had an interest and that in the not distant past a lot of the bricks had been declared rotten by the building inspector on a state job and had been refused and there had been a lawsuit and that as sure as God made little green apples with worms in them, bricks from that same kiln would be used in the schoolhouse. The kiln owned by Moore and Pillsbury’s brother-in-law used convict labor from the state pen and got it cheap, for the brother-in-law had some tie well up in the system. In fact, as I picked up later, the tie was so good that that building inspector who squawked about the bricks on the state job got thrown out, but I never knew whether he was honest or just ill-informed.

Willie didn’t have any luck bucking Pillsbury and the Sheriff. There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn