Retired farmers were moving into town.  The price of lots had increased a third.  But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds.  She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure.  She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser.  Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty.  If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Kennicott was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol’s heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California.  She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting.  Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory.  He snorted, “By golly, I’ve done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game.  Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you’ve always wanted somebody to, why, you say he’s a roughneck, and you won’t jump on the band-wagon.”

Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, “What do you know about this!  They say there’s a chance we may get another factory—­cream-separator works!” he added, “You might try to look interested, even if you ain’t!” The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol’s lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child.  The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable.  He felt injured.

An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath.

In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county.  The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers’ political meeting.  That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff—­the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops—­had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return.

The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer’s drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present.

“That’s the way to treat those fellows—­only they ought to have lynched him!” declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud “You bet!”

Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her.

Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over.  When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; “I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin.”