Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.
In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "The Club," where all the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter, "I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years—ever since it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I mean it."
"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.
Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior class, remarked to Carl Ericson: "At that, though, there's a good deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."
"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw that writes plays meant by socialism."
"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?" inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.
"Well, thunder——!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He escaped from the drug-store.
When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the town paper, the Plato Weekly Times, which bore on the front page what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:
PLATO PROFESSOR