Free Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

right,” said Rila. “I came to be with Asa. I am staying with him.”
    When we got back to the car, Rila said to me, “I’m not sure I like your friends.”
    â€œDon’t pay any attention to Herb,” I said. “As a newspaperman, he is a little short on tact.”
    â€œWhat I can’t understand is why he should be interested in me. My being here simply isn’t news.”
    â€œTo the Willow Bend Record , it is. Nothing ever happens here. Herb has to fill the paper with comings and goings. Mrs. Page holds a card party with three tables and it’s a social event. Herb writes it up in detail. Tells who was there and who won the prizes.”
    â€œAsa, you don’t mind? Maybe I should leave.”
    â€œHell, no,” I said. “Why should I mind? Flying in the face of convention? You can’t do anything that doesn’t fly in the face of convention in a place like this. And with this time-travel business, with Hiram going after Catface, it would be plain desertion if you left. You’ve got to see this thing through with me. I need you.”
    She settled into the seat as I got behind the wheel. “I hoped you would say that,” she said. “I don’t know about this time-travel business, but I do want to stay. Half of the time I believe travel in time is possible and the rest of the time I tell myself, Rila, stop being a fool. But I’m curious about Hiram. Nothing more than Hiram? He must have another name.”
    â€œHis name,” I said, “is Hiram Biglow, but most people have forgotten the Biglow part of it. He’s just Hiram, that’s all. He was born in Willow Bend, and at one time he had an older brother, but the brother ran away from home and, so far as I know, has not been heard of since. The family was an old family, reaching back into the time the town was founded. His father’s name was Horace, an only son of a son of one of the founders of Willow Bend. The family lived in the old ancestral home, one of those Victorian piles set back from the street, with an iron fence enclosing a lawn filled with trees. I remember that I used to hang on the fence when I was a kid and wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that. My family was relatively poor at the time, and we lived in just an ordinary house, and the Biglow place seemed like a mansion to me.”
    â€œBut you told me Hiram lives in a shack down by the river.”
    â€œHe does and I am getting to that. Hiram’s father was the town banker, in partnership with Ben Page’s father …”
    â€œI don’t like Ben Page any better than I like that Herb person.”
    â€œYou and almost everyone,” I said. “He’s not the sort of man who inspires a lot of confidence or admiration, although in recent years, he may have changed. There are people now who swear by him. Well, anyhow, when Hiram was ten years old or so, his father drowned in a duck-hunting accident. By this time, the older brother, who was seven or eight years older than Hiram, had lit out for parts unknown, so there was only Hiram and his mother left. The old lady lived a secluded life after that. She never left the house and she discouraged friends from calling. Hiram had always been a strange kid, backward in school and not getting along with the other kids, but no one thought too much about it. As the years went past, I suppose, his mother must have known that he wasn’t exactly normal, and so she hid away with him. Pride is a dreadful thing anywhere, and in a small town, it’s deadly. The two of them just sort of withdrew from life, and while people knew, of course, that they were there, they were fairly well forgotten. Which, I suppose, is what Mrs. Biglow had hoped would happen. By this time, I was long gone, of course, so what I tell you from here on is what I’ve heard from people after I came back.
    â€œIt turns out, finally, when the estate