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By Root 1622 0

held down by a lid before. Once we got out on the road, I made Athens trot as fast as he would go (he wouldn’t gallop) for at least a mile, until I got among other folks and felt my fears subside a little. I pulled out my pocket watch. It was only a little after ten yet, and really, I didn’t have to give Mr. Morton my article for a day or so; I saw that now was the time to try a bit of investigating on my own project. I had Athens for the rest of the day if I didn’t go back to the newspaper right away, and I thought saloons, where Missourians drank all day every day, and boasted the whole time, would probably be the place to start. After that, I thought, I might go back to the paper and sit at a desk and write my article, my ears pricked the whole time. I don’t have to tell the reader that I had never been in a saloon before, but then I was no longer much daunted by doing things that I had never done before. They all said that K.T coarsened a woman, but there was nothing for coarsening a woman quite like having her become a man!

I’d been warned all my life about low company. My father, for example, of necessity kept low company of the buying-and-selling, river-character sort, and by the time I was a child in our house in Quincy, I was aware that there were numbers of times when my mother and I would keep to her room while my father entertained low company downstairs. As I got older, though, and my father got a bit more prosperous, he found ways to keep the low company elsewhere. As my sisters grew older, they, too, were alert as terriers on the subject of low company. Each of their husbands’ positions in life were a degree or two above my father’s, and they were eager to make the most of the difference, especially Harriet, who was, and who saw herself as, the wife of a landowner (farmer if you absolutely had to look at it that way). Harriet sometimes acted as if the threshold of low company began with anything commercial (including Beatrice’s husband, Horace, and his father), as if she had never bought or sold anything in her life. When I got to K.T., low company was everywhere in evidence—the Missourians were the very type of low company—and Mrs. Bush, and to a lesser extent, Mrs. Jenkins, and even Louisa, were conscious of their elevation as New Englanders. In short, low company was a sort of poison ivy that could infect a lady any number of ways, and if it did, the effects were both painful and evident to all. Without having a very clear picture of the pastimes of low company, or how they could hurt me, I felt a decided moral dread when I had ridden back into Kansas City and saw a saloon, and knew I must go into it and then linger there, and even ask questions. The closest thing in my experience that my feeling of reluctance came to was the moment of entering the Mississippi River that time I swam across it—the skin, the sinews, the brain, the heart, all recoiled against any such immersion. I opened the door and went in, my hand in my pocket, holding Thomas’s watch for courage.

The low company numbered about eight men, including a profoundly bearded man behind a long table to one side. The room was grand in size but dimly lit, and furnished, like all of Kansas City, with an assortment of castoffs from other entrepreneurs and citizens who had gone out of business, moved on to other parts, backtracked, or died. A few of the men were sitting around a table playing cards, one of the principal occupations of low company. One man was sitting alone at another table, a pair of glasses in front of him, one full, the other empty, and two others were standing in front of the long table, chatting with the bearded man, who was dispensing whiskey, no doubt so highly rectified as to put his customers at risk for spontaneous combustion. Every single one looked up when I came in. This was another feature of low company—it was always inquisitive and unable to mind its own business.

"Hello, son," said the man behind the long table, who was, of course, the bartender, though I didn’t know this term at the time.

I remembered to whisper