Katherine was too good to be true. “Just like a character out of a book,” the delighted Winnebagos whispered to one another. Before the evening was over they had unanimously decided to urge—not merely invite, mind you, but urge—her to become a Winnebago. Katherine was delighted with the idea and accepted the invitation with another convulsing speech. It seemed incredible to the girls that they had met her just that afternoon. It seemed as if they had known her always. She fitted into their group like a thumb on a hand. She was plied with slumgullion and every other delicacy, and her health was drunk in numerous cups of cocoa. The continual flow of banter which the Winnebagos usually kept up among themselves was hushed, and everyone was willing to put the soft pedal on her own speech if only Katherine would talk some more. She told fascinating things about her life on a big stock farm out in Arkansas.
“Are there any Indians around there?” asked Veronica, whose ideas of the American Far West were rather hazy and romantic.
“Indians!” said Katherine. “I should say there were! They’re something terrible. Why, you don’t dare hang your clothes on the line, because the Indians will shoot them full of arrows! And then,” she continued, as she saw Veronica’s eyes becoming saucerlike, “there are all kind of wild animals out there, too. We can’t keep milk standing around in the pantry because the wildcats come in and drink it up, and the bears shed their hair all over the carpet! Why, one day I came in from the yard and there was a rattlesnake curled up on the piano stool!”
The Winnebagos and the Sandwiches doubled up with merriment at her awful “yarns,” but Veronica believed every word of it.
“O Katherine, you awful thing, I’m in love with you,” cried Hinpoha, in rather mixed metaphor, and drew her down on the bearskin bed beside her. “Goodness, Veronica, don’t look so excited. All the Indians there are in this country now are on reservations, and they’re entirely peaceable. You mustn’t believe a word she says.”
The jollification supper ended in a hilarious Virginia Reel, which hardly anyone could dance for laughing at Katherine’s big slippers, as she shuffled up and down the line.
“What a day this has been,” sighed Hinpoha to Gladys, with whom she was spending the night, as she sank down on the bed with all her clothes on. “We’ve made enough money to equip the Sandwiches’ gym be-yoo-tifully; we’ve made Veronica famous as a horsewoman; we’ve lost our trick mule and gained a new member for the Winnebagos. In the classic words of our gallant Captain, I think that’s ‘going some.’”
CHAPTER VI
A MORAL OBLIGATION
Katherine’s entry into High School life was a complete success—one of those rare, astonishing successes that happen about once in a decade. The regular members of the class, who have been together since the beginning, will by constant effort have attained a fair measure of popularity by the fourth year, when suddenly a personality will appear out of the vast and seize and hold the center of the stage. Katherine’s spectacular exploit at the Sandebago Circus was heralded far and wide, and when she entered school the following Monday morning she found herself already famous. Everywhere she was pointed out as “the girl who had ridden the donkey,” “the girl with the funny voice,” “the girl who made the screaming speeches.” Teachers agreed unanimously that she was the most erratically brilliant student they had ever had in their classes—when she could remember to turn her work in. Her compositions were read out in class and brought down the house. When she rose to recite you could hear a pin drop. It was an open secret that the two English teachers had drawn lots to see who would get her, and not a few pupils suddenly discovered conflicts in their recitations and got themselves changed into the class where Katherine was.
Her absent-mindedness soon became proverbial. Odd shoes—gloves of two different colors—hat on hind side before, or somebody else’s hat altogether—these were everyday occurrences. Her friends told with chuckles how she had climbed one flight of stairs too many on her way to Math class and walked into a Freshman English class, her mind busy working out the solution of a problem in geometry. When some other Katherine was called upon to recite she rose solemnly and, going to the board, gave a masterly demonstration of a knotty theorem in solid geometry, and then marched out with the class, serenely unconscious of her mistake, oblivious to the laughter of the class and the amusement of the teacher, who let her go on without interruption to see how far she would go. Her bewilderment when asked by the regular geometry teacher to explain why she had cut class that morning was comical.