Free Out of Their Minds by Clifford D. Simak Page A

were having a good time. They were spending an evening with their neighbors and were comfortable with them. Right now _they were intent upon the selling of the baskets, but later on there would be time for talk and there would be little weighty talk, I knew. They’d talk about the crops, the fishing, the new road that had been talked about for twenty years or more but had never come about and now was being talked about again, of the latest scandal (for there always was a scandal of some sort, although often of the very mildest kind), of the sermon the minister had preached last Sunday, of the old gentleman very newly dead and beloved by all of them. They’d talk of many things and then they’d go home through the softness of the late spring evening and they’d have their little worries and their neighborhood concerns, but there would be none of them weighed down by huge official worries. And it was good, I told myself, to be in a place where there were no overpowering and dark official worries.
    I felt someone tugging at my sleeve and looked in the direction of the tugging and there was Linda Bailey.
    â€œYou’d ought to bid on that one,” she whispered at me. “That one belongs to the preacher’s daughter. She’s a pretty thing. You’d enjoy meeting her.”
    â€œHow do you know,” I asked, “that it’s the preacher’s daughter’s basket?”
    â€œI just know,” she said. “Go ahead and bid.”
    It was up to three dollars and I said three dollars and a half and immediately, from across the room, came a bid for four. I looked where the bid had come from and there, standing, ranged with their backs against the wall, were three young men, in their early twenties. When I looked at them I found that all three were looking at me and it seemed to me that they were sneering at me in a very heavy-handed way.
    The tug came at my sleeve again. “Go ahead and bid,” urged Linda Bailey. “It’s them Ballard boys and the other one’s a Williams. They are terrible louts. Nancy will just die if any of the three of them should bid in her basket.”
    â€œFour fifty,” I said, unthinking, and, up on the platform George Duncan said, “I have four fifty. Who will make it five?” He turned toward the three ranged along the wall and one of them said five. “Now I have five,” sang George. “Will someone make it six?” He was looking straight at me and I shook my head, so he sold it for the five.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” Linda Bailey raged at me in her neighing whisper. “You could have kept on bidding.”
    â€œNot on your life,” I told her. “I’m not going to come into this town and the first night I am here make it tough for some young sprout to buy the basket that he wants. His girl might be involved. She might have told him beforehand how to identify her basket.”
    â€œBut Nancy’s not his girl,” said Linda Bailey, much disgusted at me. “Nancy hasn’t got a fellow. She’ll be mortified.”
    â€œYou said that they were Ballards. Aren’t they the people who live on our old home farm?”
    â€œThat they are,” she said. “And the old folks are nice enough. But them two boys of theirs! They are holy terrors. All the girls are scared of them. They go to dances all the time and they are filthy-mouthed and do a lot of drinking.”
    I looked across the room and the three still were watching me, with triumphant leers pasted on their faces. I was a stranger to the town and they had bluffed me out, they had overbid me. It was silly on the face of it, of course, but in a little place like this small triumphs and small insults, because of the lack of any other kind, are often magnified.
    Christ, I thought, why did I have to run into this Bailey woman? She’d always been bad news and she hadn’t changed. She was a meddler and a busybody