In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a half column on the marriage of the light middleweight champion and three lines devoted to the lynching of an I.W.W. agitator, the announcement:
Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention, will give an address on “Heroes of Health” at the University summer school next Friday evening.
He ran into the house gloating, “Lee! Sondelius going to lecture in Minneapolis. I’m going! Come on! We’ll hear him and have a bat and everything!”
“No, you run down by yourself. Be fine for you to get away from the town and the family and me for a while. I’ll go down with you in the fall. Honestly. If I’m not in the way, maybe you can manage to have a good long talk with Dr. Sondelius.”
“Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health authorities will be standing around him ten deep. But I’m going.”
IV
The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the hours of slow riding. He drowsed and smoked and meditated. “I’m going to forget medicine and everything else,” he vowed. “I’ll go up and talk to somebody in the smoker and tell him I’m a shoe-salesman.”
He did. Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real shoe-salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin represented, and he returned to the day coach with a renewed sense of injury. When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon, he hastened to the University and besought a ticket to the Sondelius lecture before he had even found a hotel, though not before he had found the long glass of beer which he had been picturing for a hundred miles.
He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his first evening of freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would meet a company of worthies who would succor him with laughter and talk and many drinks—not too many drinks, of course—and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a moonlight swim. He began his search for the brethren by having a cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a companion. He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.
As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, “And probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he’s simply another Roscoe Geake.”