The sociologist was citing the Van Plushvelt case as the most important “uplift” symptom of a generation, and as an excuse for his own existence.

Immediately before us were the village baseball grounds.  And now came the sportive youth of Fishampton and distributed themselves, shouting, about the diamond.

“There,” said the sociologist, pointing, “there is young Van Plushvelt.”

I raised myself (so far a cosycophant with Mary Ann) and gazed.

Young Van Plushvelt sat upon the ground.  He was dressed in a ragged red sweater, wrecked and weather-worn golf cap, run-over shoes, and trousers of the “serviceable” brand.  Dust clinging to the moisture induced by free exercise, darkened wide areas of his face.

“That is he,” repeated the sociologist.  If he had said “him” I could have been less vindictive.

On a bench, with an air, sat the young millionaire’s chum.

He was dressed in a neat suit of dark blue serge, a neat white straw hat, neat low-cut tan shoes, linen of the well-known “immaculate” trade mark, a neat, narrow four-in-hand tie, and carried a slender, neat bamboo cane.

I laughed loudly and vulgarly.

“What you want to do,” said I to the sociologist, “is to establish a reformatory for the Logical Vicious Circle.  Or else I’ve got wheels.  It looks to me as if things are running round and round in circles instead of getting anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” asked the man of progress.

“Why, look what he has done to ’Smoky’,” I replied.

“You will always be a fool,” said my friend, the sociologist, getting up and walking away.

VIII

THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF

It looked like a good thing:  but wait till I tell you.  We were down South, in Alabama—­Bill Driscoll and myself—­when this kidnapping idea struck us.  It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course.  It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.

Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with.  We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel.  Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things.  We knew that Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than constables and maybe some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers’ Budget.  So, it looked good.