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

and there was no good in her.
    The baskets were going rapidly and only a few of them were left. George was getting tired and the bidding had slowed down. I told myself that perhaps I should buy a basket, to demonstrate, if nothing else, that I was no stranger, but was a man, instead, who had come back to Pilot Knob and meant to stay awhile.
    I looked around and there was no sign of Linda Bailey. More than likely she was sore at me and had stalked away. Thinking of her, I felt a little flare of anger. What right had she to demand that I protect the minister’s daughter, Nancy, against the more than likely innocent designs—or at least ineffectual, if not innocent designs—of some loutish farm boy.
    There were only three baskets left now and George picked up one of them. It was only half the size some of the others had been and it was not overdecorated. Holding it up, he began his auction singsong.
    There were two or three bids and they got it up to three fifty and I made it four.
    Someone over against the wall said five and I glanced in that direction and the three were grinning at me—grinning, it seemed to me, with all the clownish malice in the world.
    â€œMake it six,” I said.
    â€œSeven,” said the middle one of the trio.
    â€œI have seven,” said George, somewhat aghast, for this was the highest any bid had run that night. “Do I hear seven and a half or does someone want to make it eight?”
    I hesitated for a moment. I was certain that the first few bids had not come from any of the three against the wall. They had only entered the bidding after I had made my bid. They were, I was certain, deliberately baiting me and I was sure, as well, that everyone in the room knew what they were up to.
    â€œEight?” asked George, still looking at me. “Do I hear an eight?”
    â€œNot eight,” I told him. “Let us make it ten.”
    George gulped. “Ten!” he cried. “Do I hear eleven?”
    He switched his eyes to the three against the wall. They glared back at him.
    â€œEleven,” he said. “It takes eleven. No raise smaller than a dollar. Do I hear eleven?”
    He didn’t hear eleven.
    When I went to the front of the room to pay the auction clerk and to get the basket, I glanced at the wall. The three were no longer there.
    Standing to one side, I opened the basket and the name on the slip of paper placed atop the lunch was that of Kathy Adams.

8
    The first lilacs were coming out and in the cool, damp evening they had filled the air with a faint suggestion of that fragrance which, in the weeks to come, would hang a heavy perfume along all the streets and footpaths of this little town. A wind, blowing up the hollow from the river, set the suspended street lights at the intersections swinging and the light and shadow on the ground went bouncing back and forth.
    â€œI’m glad that it is over,” Kathy Adams said. “The program, I mean, and the school year too. But I’ll be coming back in September.”
    I looked down at the girl walking at my side and she was, it seemed to me; an entirely different person than the one I’d seen that morning in the store. She had done something to her hair and the schoolteacherish look of it was gone and she’d put away her glasses. Protective coloration, I wondered—the way she’d looked that morning, a deliberate effort to make herself appear the kind of teacher who would gain acceptance in this community. And it was a shame, I told myself. Given half a chance, she was a pretty girl.
    â€œYou said you’ll be back,” I said. “Where will you spend the summer?”
    â€œGettysburg,” she said.
    â€œGettysburg?”
    â€œGettysburg, P.A.,” she told me. “I was born there and my family still is there. I go back each summer.”
    â€œI was there just a few days ago,” I said. “I stopped on my way here. Spent two full days,