Free Out of Their Minds by Clifford D. Simak

play that Kathy Adams proudly announced they had worked out themselves.
    It all, in its stumbling way, was entirely delightful and I sat there remembering when I had gone to school in this very building and had taken part in exactly such a program. I tried to remember the names of some of the teachers I had had and it was only toward the end of the program that I remembered one of them had been named Miss Stein, a strange, angular, flighty person with an abundance of red hair and most easily upset by some of the pranks we were always thinking up. I wondered where Miss Stein might be this very evening and how life had treated her. Better, I hoped, than some of us kids had treated her when we had gone to school.
    Linda Bailey tugged at my jacket sleeve and spoke in a grating whisper. “Them kids are good, ain’t they?”
    I nodded that they were.
    â€œThis Miss Adams is a right good teacher,” Linda Bailey whispered. “I’m afraid that she won’t stay here long. This little school of ours can’t expect to keep someone as good as her.”
    Then the program was over and George Duncan came pushing through the crowd and took me in tow and began to introduce me to some other people. Some of them I remembered and some of them I didn’t, but they seemed to remember me, so I pretended that I did.
    But right in the middle of it Miss Adams was standing up on the little platform at the front of the room and calling to George Duncan, “You forgot,” she told him, “or are you pretending to, in hopes you’ll get out of it? But you promised to be our auctioneer tonight.”
    George protested, but I could see that he was pleased. One could see with only half an eye that George Duncan was an important person in Pilot Knob. He owned the general store and was the postmaster and a member of the school board and he could turn his hand to many other little civic chores, like auctioneering the baskets at a basket social. He was the man that Pilot Knob always turned to when they needed something done.
    So he went up to the platform and turned to the table that was stacked with decorated baskets and boxes and picked one of them up for the crowd to look at. But before he started in on his auctioneering, he made a little speech.
    â€œAll of you know,” he said, “what this is all about. The proceeds from this basket social will be used to buy new books for the school library, so you will have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever you spend here will be used to a good purpose. You aren’t just buying the basket and the privilege of eating with the lady whose name you find inside it; you also are contributing to a very praiseworthy public cause. So I’ll ask you fellows out there to loosen up a bit and spend some of that money that is sagging down your pockets.”
    He hoisted the basket that he held. “Now here,” he said, “is the kind of basket that I like to offer. I tell you, fellows, this one has a hefty feel to it. There’s a lot of good eating packed into it and the way it’s decorated and all, I’d say the lady who put it up probably paid as much attention to what went into it as how it looks outside. And it might interest you to know that I seem to catch a whiff of good fried chicken.”
    â€œNow,” he asked, “what am I bid?”
    â€œA dollar,” said someone, and someone else immediately made it two and then from the back of the room came a bid of two and a half.
    â€œTwo dollars and a half,” said George Duncan in aggrieved surprise. “Are you boys going to stop at two and a half? Why, if you were to buy this basket by the pound, that would be dirt cheap. Now do I hear …”
    Someone bid three dollars and George worked it up from there, fifty cents and a quarter at a time, to four seventy-five and finally knocked it down for that.
    I looked about the crowd. They were a group of friendly folks and they