"You're utterly mad, but we like you!" said one of the boys.
In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for
Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning
mail, which startled me. It was a clipping from the Laurel _Globe_--a
vilely slanderous article, headed, "Good Riddance."...
And first it lied that I had run away from my "confederates" of the
Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the
town's morals ... which was, of course, not true ... I had made a
special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be
needed. If so, I would defer my trip East. And he had replied that it
would be all right for me to go....
But the second count--the personal part of the story, was more atrocious
... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an
undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitue of
the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling
about with their men, drunk.
I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands,
and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all
his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The
lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!
* * * * *
Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden.
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