On the first afternoon when the fever was making me pretty stupid, I had spent maybe a half hour sitting by the stove in Bud Means’ store, below the printing office. Near by, there was a water bucket, with dipper, for everybody’s use. I did not drink at the public bucket that day — but when it became known that I had a high fever at that very time, and was now down with smallpox, it was but natural for Bud to imagine that I had tried to cool my fever with several trips to his water bucket. And there was no imagination about the quaff he himself had taken from that dipper, after I had left. Bud told me after I had gotten out—not right away, you can bet your life—that it almost made him sick. With Elva’s and Eli’s pockmarked faces constantly in mind, I laid awake nights to make sure that I would not, in my sleep, scratch my face, or misplace the slipperyelm poultice, done in cheesecloth, in which my face was swathed. And then, even then, it was awful, a mass of apparently disfigurating open pustules, with face redder than a spanked baby. After my face had come back to somewhere near normal, I sent my neighbor, Ed Reitzel, up to B. O. Bass’ barber shop to buy—not borrow—a razor and mug, aiming to use them only once. Then, before I had started on that oh-so-awful looking face, I began to wonder if maybe Byron had not sent me his “deadman’s” razor, and I had to send Ed back to make sure about that. I knew that Byron, when telling one of his funny barbershop stories, was liable to do and say things off key. One time he poured nearly a whole bottle of hairoil on my head—which I had not ordered, and didn’t want—while he was looking away from his work, and laughing at his own funny story. Then I had to have a shampoo before I could go to “protracted” meeting that night. Fixed up with Byron’s razor, I looked a little more like myself, and was now ready to hold an appointment with my girl, who was also the manager of my newspaper business, with the alternate help of Herb Wait and Jim Harvey Hyde, of the Centralia Journal. She had secured for me from General Passenger Agent Barker in St. Louis a pass over the MK&T railroad, to Galveston. George Cawood had sent me word not to show up at his store for awhile after I would get out, and I knew that all the town people were feeling the same way about me. Hence the trip to the gulf. As instructed, Myrtle met me at the front gate of her home, handed me my credentials and the money she had gotten for me, stood off a reasonable distance, also as per instructions, and said, “You look like the devil.” The cold had enhanced the “splendor” of the blemishes on my face. If she could have said further, “But I still love you in the same old way,” it would have been a more cheerful sendoff for the long journey ahead of me.