The young man stopped talking, realizing what he had done. The class was on the verge of breaking into boisterous gaiety and gales of strangled guffaws swept the room. No one liked Prof. White.
The professor sputtered feebly and tried to talk. Finally he did.
«Perhaps, Mr. Culver,» he suggested, «you had better come up here while I come down and occupy your seat.»
«I’m sorry, sir. I forgot myself. It won’t happen again. I publicly and sincerely apologize.»
He sat down and Prof. White went on with the lecture.
Which incident explains why Rush Culver became a tradition at the University of Wisconsin.
Marvelous tales were told of him. He was voted the man of the year in his senior year. He was elected a member of outstanding campus organizations which even his great football prowess in his junior and sophomore years had failed to obtain for him.
From a mediocre student he became regarded as a brilliant mind. Students to whom he had formerly gone for help with mathematics and other studies now came to him.
At one time he took the floor in a political science discussion hour and used up the entire hour explaining the functioning of a Utopian form of government. Those who heard him later said that he sounded as if he might have seen the government in actual operation.
But his greatest glory came from the credit which was accorded him for Wisconsin’s football triumphs. Rumor on the campus said that he had worked out and given to the coach a series of plays, based upon gridiron principles then entirely new to the game. Rush, when approached, denied he had given them to the coach. But, however that may be, Wisconsin did spring upon its opponents that fall a devastating attack. Team after team fell before the onslaught of the Badgers. The team travelled to Minneapolis and there it marched through the mighty Golden Gophers with apparent ease, while fans and sports-writers grew faint with wonder and the football world trembled with amazement.
Clamorous popular demand forced the Big Ten to rescind its ruling against post-season games and at the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1945, the Badgers defeated the Trojans 49 to 0 in what sports-writers termed the greatest game ever played in football.
Jimmy Russell was up a tree. He had been lucky to find the tree, for there were few in that part of the country and at the moment he reached it, Jimmy was desperately in need of a tree.
Below him patrolled an enormous grizzly bear, fighting mad, snarling and biting at the shafts of arrows which protruded from his shoulders. The bole of the tree was scarred and splintered where the enraged animal had struck savagely at it with huge paws armed with four-inch talons. Low limbs had been ripped from the trunk as the beast reared to his full height, attempting to reach his quarry.
In a gully a quarter of a mile away lay the ripped and torn body of Chief Hiawatha. The bear had singled the Indian out in his first charge. Jimmy had sent his last arrow winging deep into the animal’s throat as the beast had torn the life from his friend. Then, without means of defense and knowing that his companion was dead, Jimmy had run, madly, blindly. The tree saved him, at least temporarily. He still had hopes that that last arrow, inflicting a deep throat wound, from which the blood flowed freely, would eventually spell death to the maddened beast.
Sadly he reflected, as he perched on a large branch, that if he ever did get down alive the rest of the trip would be lonely. It was still a long way to Mexico and the Aztec civilization, but the way would not have seemed long with old Chief Hiawatha beside him. The chief had been his only friend in this savage, prehistoric world and now he lay dead and Jimmy faced another thousand miles alone, on foot, without adequate weapons.
«Maybe I should have waited at the village,» Jimmy told himself.
«Somebody might have gotten through to me. But maybe nobody wanted to get through. Funny, though, I always figured Hart was my friend, even if he did get hard-boiled every time he saw me. Still—I waited three years and that should have given him plenty of time.»
A lone buffalo bull wandered up the gully and over the ridge where the grizzly stood guard under the tree. The bear, sighting the bull, rushed at him, roaring with rage. For a moment it appeared the bull might stand his ground, but before the bear covered half the distance to him, he wheeled about and lumbered off. The grizzly came back to the tree.
Far out on the plain Jimmy located a skittering band of antelope and watched them for a long time. A wolf slunk through the long grass in a gully to the west of the tree. In the sky vultures began to wheel and turn.
Jimmy shook his fist at them and cursed.
Twilight came and still the bear kept up the watch. At times he withdrew a short distance and lay down as if he were growing weak from loss of blood. But in each instance he came back to resume the march around the tree.
The moon came up and wolves howled plaintively from the ridges to the east. Jimmy, tearing a buckskin strip from his shirt, lashed himself to the tree. It was well he did so, for in spite of the danger below, despite his efforts to keep awake, he fell asleep.
The moon was low in the west when he awoke. He was stiff and chilled and for a moment he did not remember where he was.
A slinking form slipped over a ridge a short distance away and from somewhere on the prairie came the roaring grunting of a herd of awakening buffalo.
With a realization of his position coming to him, Jimmy looked about for the bear. He did not locate the beast at first, but finally saw its great bulk stretched out on the ground some distance away. He shouted, but the animal did not stir.
Late afternoon saw Jimmy heading southwest across the plains. He was clad in tattered buckskins. He was armed with a bow and a few arrows. At his belt swung a tomahawk. But he walked with a free swinging tread and his head was high.
Behind him a mound of stones marked the last resting place of all that remained mortal of Chief Hiawatha. Ahead of him lay Mexico, land of the Aztecs.
There he would find the highest order of civilization in pre-Columbian North America. There he would find people whose legends told of a strange white god who came to them in ancient days and taught them many things.
This was the story they had told the Spanish conquistadores. That was why they had hailed Cortez as a god likewise, to their later sorrow.
«A white god who taught them many things,» said Jimmy to himself and chuckled. Might he not have been that white god? Could he not have taught them many things? But if he had been a god to the Aztecs, why had he not warned them against the Spaniards?
Jimmy chuckled again.
«A newspaperman should make one hell of a good god for a bunch of redskins,» he told himself.
Mr. Meek Plays Polo
Clifford Simak was not one to write sequels, several times turning down tempting offers to do so. But in this case he apparently was eager to do a sequel, writing this story even before its predecessor (see «Mr. Meek—Musketeer,» in volume two of this series) had been published. Moreover, his journals indicate that he would later write, and sell, a third Mr. Meek story (named, it appears, «Mr. Meek Drinks a Toast»); but that story, although reportedly sold to Super Science Stories, was never published, and has been lost … as far as I know, at least.
This second Mr. Meek story was published in the Fall 1944 issue of Planet Stories . As in many of Cliff’s older stories, such things as the prices of items and the language his characters use seem ridiculous for a story set in the far future. But those things are not meant to be taken literally, but to give meaning to the descriptions of the characters’ personalities—that is, to show that they are «ordinary» people, not any sort of elite.