husband, son, and I were at the mercy of a Texas cyclone! Next the house turned over!

The sounds from the general utility room, whence my son and I had just come, were like a mountain avalanche. A heavy chiffonier, a big box of books, and a refrigerator placed against the south wall took a sixteen-foot drop through a safe and an iron heating stove, and their remains ploughed through an oil-stove and the dining-table, all stopping short in a twisted heap as the house came to rest on its north side. In this upheaval the north wall became the floor, the south wall became the roof, and the real floor took the place so recently vacated by the south wall. As the floor space was sixteen feet, everything in the house, including the boy and me, took a drop ranging from one to sixteen feet-and we took it in a hurry.

Fortunately for us the bedroom was scantily furnished. The bed, which was just a pallet, was placed on some low furniture crates. As I felt it moving under me, I grabbed my son in my arms and closed my eyes. My last thought was: "And this is the end of it all!"

Then darkness came over me! I think my mind went blank from terror. My next conscious act was gasping for breath. My mouth and nose were full of dust from the walls and ceiling. Soon I realized that I was still on the mattress, which was now on the floor, with my boy standing at my side. I could hear my husband's agonized voice calling from out-of-doors: "Answer me! Answer me!"

"We're safe!" I shouted. "But it is as dark as pitch in here."

The doors were sixteen feet in the air and the windows faced the ground. I turned around like a trapped animal. Then I espied a streak of light. I shoved my son toward it and we scurried out through a hole between the floor and the west wall; out from the Stygian darkness of death into the light of life. No rain was falling! The stars were shining overhead! The storm had gone now to the east and north of us; but the cyclone part had blown itself out. The twister wrecked the house, the windmill, and my husband's truck. Its path was about fifty feet wide and extended less than a mile. This was strewn with wreckage.

My favorite story of the freakish action of cyclones is that of the Nebraska twister which blew a dozen little chickens into a teakettle. From this the farmer's wife served chicken soup-merely straining out the feathers-to her homeless and foodless neighbors until the relief train arrived from Lincoln. But this Texas twister flipped up the platform of a wheatbinder which stood north of the house, and the peaked roof came down upon the platform as it came up. This alone held the north wall a little off the ground; otherwise the house, which so miraculously escaped demolishment in the twist of the wind, would have collapsed upon us from the impact. As it was, the force of the fall knocked out the entire east end, and separated the floor from the west wall, through which aperture my son and I crawled from the bedroom. When one considers the frailty of the platform of a wheat-binder, the chicken soup takes its place among the verities.

Song-writers, columnists, jokers, and all that frothy fringe of the litterateurs tell us things are not the same from the outside looking in as they are from the inside looking out. This holds true in cyclones! My husband, after he had finished with the mules, ran to unload the wagon. He heard the roar of the wind, but believed it the approaching rain. He grabbed a sack of seed from the wagon and hurried with it to the east room. As he placed the sack on the door-sill to open the door, the house walked away from him. He said had he seen Harold Lloyd chasing a house in the movies, he would have known the scene was faked. In a second the house turned over and the entire east end fell at his feet with a crash. Then he began his agonized cries, which finally reached us.

We were afraid that the house might collapse on us, so we left the salvaging of the furniture and our clothes until the next day, taking a chance on rain which would have ruined them. We were really too badly shaken to do anything. Property seemed of very little value to us then, for we had just faced death! We did pull out some wraps and a quilt which were near the aperture in the bedroom.

While my husband was hitching up a team to take us to the main ranch-house, my boy and I stood huddled by the wagon

waiting. Through my mind flashed a thought, the terrible price that is paid for pioneering. It may be all right when things go well, but in an emergency one is helpless. Had we been pinioned under the furniture in that overturned house, or otherwise injured, a week's time or maybe more would have intervened before help would have reached us. In the meantime we would have died from starvation, horror, and our wounds. Or had we been killed we would have lain there unattended in death, as the wild animals do in the fields. It seems impossible that such a thing could happen in the midst of this twentieth-century civilization, but it can and does. The house had no telephone and no one ever passed that way, for it was off the main road and hidden by a slight roll of the prairie. The only one who ever came near was the owner, who occasionally brought the mail and our supplies. But even he had just left for an indefinite length of time on a big cattle-drive to the north. These thoughts were in keeping with the weirdness around. We were in semidarkness

with not a sign of life anywhere, while the storm was dying away on the horizon with great flashes of lightning to the east and north.

As I tried to climb into the wagon, I realized that I had been hurt. I stopped a wash-stand with my back. We found it with the remains of the lamp, whose flame the concussion had fortunately extinguished, piled up on the mattress where I had been. Wash-stands are all right in their place, but this one took a backhanded thrust at me. Base ingratitude! I had just rescued the old-fashioned thing from the junk pile and reinstated it in the family circle.

As a result of this cyclone, I blew out to the Puget Sound country for a summer's rest. For here a storm is so unusual that it is termed something out of the ordinary. Nerves! Well, I'll say so. But then I don't believe that Barney Oldfield would trade his racer for a Texas cyclone; or Lieutenants Macready and Kelly would go in for a non-stop flight between time and eternity, such as I did. Do you?

VOL. LXXVII.—47

T

HERE is scandal and gloom at Pine River College. The president is under suspicion. The football coach is explaining. The registrar says he knows nothing about it. The business office refuses to disclose facts. The State Association of Colleges, after an investigation, has reproved and rejected.

The whole thing has to do with the motives and abilities of Mike Nowisky. Mike lives on a farm near the college. His people are poor. They have not "been over" long. At high school Mike had listened to representatives of various institutions of learning tell how gloriously shiny is the halo about the head of the youth who works his way through college. Mike learned English in school, and American everywhere. He wasn't sure whether the boy with the halo worked the faculty or worked with his hands. His adventurous soul was willing to try anything once. He had worked with his great hands; he had smiled his slow contagious smile at the young women fresh from the university who taught him in high school. Mike longed for college. College seemed gorgeous. There was the glittering band at football games. He exulted in their proud marching, his feet beating time and his heart beating overtime. His music-loving soul responded to the joyous carollings of the glee club. "Swinging Down the Lane" was tantalizing enough, but when those youthful throats poured out undying loyalty to dear old Pine River, "matchless college of the West," he longed to add his high tenor to the collective vow of deathless affection. The high visibility of the red ribbons diagonally across their more or less snowy shirt-fronts suggested royalty. True he felt the "dress suit" would be awkward on his bulging form, though the young fellows who wore them seemed at home

in them. (He had not heard the president tell the glee club how their appearance reminded him of the famous scripture, "and they rent their clothes.") Mike loved above all to sing.

And here began the trouble.

Mike presented himself in the president's office "to find out about this working yourself through college," at a time when the glee-club coach was lamenting that the club was all shot to pieces. The professors who had scouted for students. had discovered a wealth of football material, a goodly galaxy of debating stars, plenty of valedictorians and salutatorians of high-school classes, but not a real tenor. There were basses enough and plenty for the middle parts, and two or three who could reach the high notes and accomplish barber-shop effects of a rasping sort; but a real tenor hadn't registered in Pine River. If the dress suits with the flamboyant red ribbons were again to bring renown to the old college on the spring-vacation trip, a real tenor must be discovered.

Mike spoke con amore of his desire and came near tremolo in his eagerness. The president encouraged him but was cautiously vague. The good jobs in the dining-room were all taken. The two hotels down-town had all their waiters. The janitor's assistants had already been assigned. Every known furnace not stoked by its owner or its owner's wife had been spoken for. The laundries had agents, the clothes-pressers had agents, the sodafountains had mixers, stores had boys for Saturdays: there had been early birds after all the jobs.

Mike was appealing. It was hard to be certain whether it was his smile, or his beautiful voice or his eagerness. The glee-club coach was a man of action, however. "Say, boy," he blurted, before the president had done much but listen (and the president was a rare listener), "do you sing? Can you carry a tune? Do you know music? Oh, here, come to my studio. I want to see you."

Uncomprehending, the tall lad obeyed. With Old World courtesy he bowed low to the president and followed this strange, sudden man who didn't say a farewell word to his chief.

Mike could sing. He knew music. He could carry a tune-anywhere, but especially in the high altitudes. Soon he was left to hold down a chair in the studio while the now excited music man hurried back into the president's sanctum with determination in both eyes.

"Say, we've got to have him. He's the tenor. He's one tenor in a thousand. He'll make the glee club. I'll board him myself and room him. He can tend the furnace or the baby or help my wife with the dishes. Holy Paderewski, he's got a voice like a seraph in a first-string angel choir. Can't you give him a scholarship? I don't care about that fool rule the faculty have about no scholarships for freshmen. He's got to stay. I'll take up a

But Mike's appealing smile was being remembered. "Wait! I've a fund of my own, and it isn't bound by rules. Let me look. I've got it! I'll give him enough for tuition. Sign him up."

And so he was registered. Nowisky, Michael Krowatsky, became to the faculty a freshman, and to a joyous student body, instructive in its christenings, Nowisky became "Volstead," and his first name, never used, was announced to be Prohibition.

But so long as Mike knew himself to be a freshman, they could call him what they pleased. He would be Volstead or Carrie Nation or Frances Willard. He would tend the baby or the furnace or the lawnmower, if he could only be one of the joyous crowd.

The athletic coach had the best football squad of his experience and no quarterback. Alert as he was with the training of his perspiring giants, he longed for a quarter-back. His captain could do the

head work and could call signals, his backs were promising; but for a fast quarter-back with big hands to throw passes he would sell his hardened soul.

And with his absurd little green cap on his shock of blonde hair there was Mike on the side-lines. The coach looked him over, felt him over, then bowled him over with words like the singing teacher's: "I want you!"

Mike was conscious and ill at ease in a football suit. His tough arm obeyed instructions and he threw. Could-hepass? The coach was ecstatic. For three days underlings handled the line, the ends, and the backs. A four-year man belabored the freshman aspirants to football glory, while the coach and Mike worked behind the gymnasium alone, save for two incredulous ends of experience who caught the Volstead passes. Sworn to secrecy Volstead spent night hours with his new tyrant, the coach. He learned it as though his ancestors had all been letter men. It wasn't reasonable, it wasn't precedented, but he absorbed football like a sponge. He was ready for the first game.

Soon no secrecy existed. The quarterback was a sensation. If there had been any doubt about the Pine River claim to the State championship it was gone. The students who nicknamed him said he was a bear, a whiz, and a wonder. The newspapers of the whole State carried his fame. The championship was settled.

And the scandal spread. Pine River had bought him. He was being given board, room, and tuition to play football. The association called the athletic conference representatives together and the damnable facts were before them. Nowisky, Michael Krowatsky, was declared ineligible. He had come to Pine River with no money. One Pine River professor was giving him board and room. The president, so long a stickler for institutional proprieties, had violated his own rules and had made an exception of Mike by granting him free tuition on account of his athletic ability, and this from the one president in the State who had been loudest in his denunciation of athletic abuses, and most prompt to protest against the subterfuges of unprincipled coaches. Volstead was disqualified. Pine River College was proved a liar, a cheat,