A MASTER'S DEGREE
By Margaret Hill McCarter
TO THE KANSAS BOYS AND GIRLS
WHO HAVE NOT YET EARNED THEIR DEGREES;
AND TO THOSE OLDER IN YEARS, EVERYWHERE,
“CAPTAINS OVER HUNDREDS,”
WHO WOULD WIN TO THE LARGER MASTERY.
In the old days there were angels who came and
took men by the hand and led them away from the
city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels
now. But yet men are led away from threatening
destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads
them gently forth toward a calm and bright land, so
that they look no more backward; and the hand may
be a little child's.
GEORGE ELIOT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
THE MEETING
I. “DEAN FUNNYBONE”
II. POTTER'S CLAY
III. PIGEON PLACE
IV. THE KICKAPOO CORRAL
V. THE STORM
VI. THE GAME
VII. THE DAY OF RECKONING
VIII. LOSS, OR GAIN?
IX. GAIN, OR LOSS?
X. THE THIEF IN THE MOUTH
XI. THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
XII. THE SILVER PITCHER
XIII. THE MAN BELOW THE SMOKE
XIV. THE DERELICTS
XV. THE MASTERY
THE PARTING
A MASTER'S DEGREE
THE MEETING
...There is neither East nor West, Border, nor
Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they
come from the ends of the earth!
KIPLING
IT happened by mere chance that the September day on which Professor
Vincent Burgess, A.B., from Boston, first entered Sunrise College as
instructor in Greek, was the same day on which Vic Burleigh, overgrown
country boy from a Kansas claim out beyond the Walnut River, signed up
with the secretary of the College Board and paid the entrance fee for
his freshman year. And further, by chance, it happened that the two
young men had first met at the gateway to the campus, one coming
from the East and the other from the West, and having exchanged the
courtesies of stranger greeting, they had walked, side by side, up the
long avenue to the foot of the slope. Together, they had climbed the
broad flight of steps leading up to the imposing doorway of Sunrise,
with the great letter S carved in stone relief above it; and, after
pausing a moment to take in the matchless wonder of the landscape over
which old Sunrise keeps watch, the college portal had swung open, and
the two had entered at the same time.
Inside the doorway the Professor and the country boy were impressed,
though in differing degrees, with the massive beauty of the rotunda over
which the stained glass of the dome hangs a halo of mellow radiance.
Involuntarily they lifted their eyes toward this crown of light and
saw far above them, wrought in dainty coloring, the design of the great
State Seal of Kansas, with its inscription They saw something more in
that upward glance. On the stairway of the rotunda, Elinor Wream,
the niece of the president of Sunrise College, was leaning over the
balustrade, looking at them with curious eyes. Her smile of recognition
as she caught sight of Professor Burgess, gave place to an expression of
half-concealed ridicule, as she glanced down at Vic Burleigh, the big,
heavy-boned young fellow, so grotesquely impossible to the harmony of
the place.
As the two men dropped their eyes, they encountered the upturned face
of a plainly dressed girl coming up the stairs from the basement, with a
big feather duster in her hand. It was old Bond Saxon's daughter Dennie,
who was earning her tuition by keeping the library and offices in
order. As if to even matters, it was Vic Burleigh who caught a token of
recognition now, while the young Professor was surveyed with fearless
disapproval.
All this took only a moment of time. Long afterward these two men knew
that in that moment an antagonism was born between them that must fight
itself out through the length of days. But now, Dr. Lloyd Fenneben, Dean
of Sunrise, known to students and alumni alike as “Dean Funnybone,” was
grasping each man's hand with a cordial grip and measuring each with a
keen glance from piercing black eyes, as he bade them equal welcome.
And here all likeness of conditions ends for these two. Days come and
go, moons wax and wane, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and
winter glide fourfold through their appointed seasons, before the two
young men stand side by side on a common level again. And the events
of these changing seasons ring in so rapidly, and in so inevitable a
fashion, that the whole cycle runs like a real story along the page.
STRIFE
_With the first faint note out of distance flung,
From the moment man hears the siren call
Of Victory's bugle, which sounds for all,
To his inner self the promise is made
To weary not, rest not, but all unafraid
Press on--till for him the paean be sung.
The song for the victor is sweet, is sweet--
Yet to the music a memory clings
Of trampled nestlings, of broken wings,
And of faces white with defeat!_
--ELIZABETH D. PRESTON
CHAPTER I. “DEAN FUNNYBONE”
_Nature they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:
For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
.............................
With stuff untainted,
shaped a hero new_.--LOWELL
DR. LLOYD FENNEBEN, Dean of Sunrise College, had migrated to the Walnut
Valley with the founding of the school here. In fact, he had brought the
college with him when he came hither, and had set it, as a light not to
be hidden, on the crest of that high ridge that runs east of the little
town of Lagonda Ledge. And the town eagerly took the new school to
itself; at once its pride and profit. Yea, the town rises and sets with
Sunrise. When the first gleam of morning, hidden by the east ridge from
the Walnut Valley, glints redly from the south windows of the college
dome in the winter time, and from the north windows in the summer time,
the town bestirs; itself, and the factory whistles blow. And when the
last crimson glory of evening puts a halo of flame about the brow of
Sunrise, the people know that out beyond the Walnut River the day is
passing, and the pearl-gray mantle of twilight is deepening to velvety
darkness on the wide, quiet prairie lands.
Lagonda Ledge was a better place after the college settled permanently
above it. Some improvident citizens took a new hold on life, while some
undesirables who had lived in lawless infamy skulked across the Walnut
and disappeared in that rough picturesque region full of uncertainties
that lies behind the west bluffs of the stream. All this, after the
college had found an abiding place on the limestone ridge. For Sunrise
had been a migratory bird before reaching the outskirts of Lagonda
Ledge. As a fulfillment of prophecy, it had arisen from the visions and
pockets of some Boston scholars, and it had come to the West and was
made flesh--or stone--and dwelt among men on the outskirts of a booming
young Kansas town.
Lloyd Fenneben was just out of Harvard when Dr. Joshua Wream, his
step-brother, many years his senior, professor of all the dead languages
ever left unburied, had put a considerable fortune into his hands, and
into his brain the dream of a life-work--even the building of a great
university in the West. For the Wreams were a stubborn, self-willed,
bookish breed, who held that salvation of souls could come only through
possession of a college diploma. Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with
all his youth and health and money, with high ideals and culture and
ambition for success and dreams of honor--and, hidden deep down, the
memory of some sort of love affair, but that was his own business. With
this dream of a new Harvard on the western prairies, he had burned his
bridges behind him, and in an unbusiness-like way, relying too much upon
a board of trustees whom he had interested in his plans he had eagerly
begun his task, struggling to adapt the West to his university model,
measuring all men and means by the scholarly rule of his Alma Mater.
Being a young man, he took himself full seriously, and it was a
tremendous blow to his sense of dignity when the youthful Jayhawkers at
the outset dubbed him “Dean Funnybone”--a name he was never to lose.
His college flourished so amazingly that another boom town, farther
inland, came across the prairie one day, and before the eyes of the
young dean bought it of the money-loving trustees--body and soul and
dean--and packed it off as the Plains Indians would carry off a white
captive, miles away to the westward. Plumped down in a big frame
barracks in the public square of twenty acres in the middle of this new
town, at once real estate dealers advertised the place as the literary
center of Kansas; while lots in straggling additions far away across the
prairie draws were boomed as “college flats within walking distance of
the university.”
In this new setting Lloyd Fenneben started again to build up what had
been so recklessly torn down. But it was slow doing, and in a downcast
hour the head of the board of trustees took council with the young dean.
“Funnybone, that's what the boys call you, ain't it?” The name had come
along over the prairie with the school. “Funnybone, you are as likely
a man as ever escaped from Boston. But you're never going to build the
East into the West, no more'n you could ram the West into the Atlantic
seaboard states. My advice to you is to get yourself into the West for
good and drop your higher learnin' notions, and be one of us, or beat it
back to where you came from quick.”
Dean Fenneben listened as a man who hears the reading of his own
obituary.
“You've come out to Kansas with beautiful dreams,” the bluff trustee
continued. “Drop 'em! You're too late for the New England pioneers who
come West. They've had their day and passed on. The thing for you to do
is to commercialize yourself right away. Go to buyin' and sellin' dirt.
It's all a man can do for Kansas now. Just boom her real estate.”
“All a man can do for Kansas!” Fenneben repeated slowly.
“Sure, and I'll tell you something more. This town is busted, absolutely
busted. I, and a few others, brought this college here as an investment
for ourselves. It ain't paid us, and we've throwed the thing over. I've
just closed a deal with a New Jersey syndicate that gets me rid of every
foot of ground I own here. The county-seat's goin' to be eighteen
miles south, and it will be kingdom come, a'most, before the railroad
extension is any nearer 'n that. Let your university go, and come with
me. I can make you rich in six months. In six weeks the coyotes will be
howlin' through your college halls, and the prairie dogs layin' out
a townsite on the campus, and the rattlesnakes coilin' round the
doorsteps. Will you come, Funnybone?”
The trustee waited for an answer. While he waited, the soul of the young
dean found itself.
“Funnybone!” Lloyd repeated. “I guess that's just what I need--a funny
bone in my anatomy to help me to see the humor of this thing. Go with
you and give up my college? Build up the prosperity of a commonwealth
by starving its mind! No, no; I'll go on with the thing I came here to
do--so help me God!”
“You'll soon go to the devil, you and your old school. Good-by!” And the
trustee left him.
A month later, Dean Fenneben sat alone in his university barracks and
saw the prairie dogs making the dust fly as they digged about what had
been intended for a flower bed on the campus. Then he packed up his
meager library and other college equipments and walked ten miles across
the plains to hire a man with a team to haul them away. The teamster had
much ado to drive his half-bridle-wise Indian ponies near enough to
the university doorway to load his wagon. Before the threshold a huge
rattlesnake lay coiled, already disputing any human claim to this
kingdom of the wild.
Discouraging as all this must have been to Fenneben, when he started
away from the deserted town he smiled joyously as a man who sees his
road fair before him.
“I might go back to Cambridge and poke about after the dead languages
until my brother passes on, and then drop into his chair in the
university,” he said to himself, “but the trustee was right. I can never
build the East into the West. But I can learn from the East how to bring
the West into its own kingdom. I can make the dead languages serve me
the better to speak the living words here. And if I can do that, I
may earn a Master's Degree from my Alma Mater without the writing of a
learned thesis to clinch it. But whether I win honor or I am forgotten,
this shall be my life-work--out on these Kansas prairies, to till a soil
that shall grow MEN AND WOMEN.”
For the next three years Dean Fenneben and his college flourished on
the borders of a little frontier town, if that can be called flourishing
which uses up time, and money, and energy, Christian patience, and
dogged persistence. Then an August prairie fire, sweeping up from the
southwest, leaped the narrow fire-guard about the one building and
burned up everything there, except Dean Fenneben. Six years, and nothing
to show for his work on the outside. Inside, the six years' stay
in Kansas had seen the making over of a scholarly dreamer into a
hard-headed, far-seeing, masterful man, who took the West as he found
it, but did not leave it so. Not he! All the power of higher learning he
still held supreme. But by days of hard work in the college halls, and
nights of meditation out in the silent sanctuary spaces of the prairies
round about him, he had been learning how to compute the needs of men as
the angel with the golden reed computed the walls and gates of the New
Jerusalem--_according to the measure of a man_.
Such was Dean Fenneben who came after six years of service to the little
town of Lagonda Ledge to plant Sunrise on the crest above the Walnut
Valley beyond reach of prairie fire or bursting boom. Firm set as the
limestone of its foundations, he reared here a college that should live,
for that its builder himself with his feet on the ground and his face
toward the light had learned the secret of living.
Miles away across the valley, the dome of Sunrise could be seen by day.
By night, the old college lantern at first, and later the studding of
electric lights, made a beacon for all the open countryside. But if
the wayfarer, by chance or choice, turned his footsteps to those rocky
bluffs and glens beyond the Walnut River, wherefrom the town of Lagonda
Ledge takes its name, he lost the guiding ray from the hilltop and
groped in black and dangerous ways where darkness rules.
Above the south turret hung the Sunrise bell, whose resonant voice
filled the whole valley, and what the sight of Sunrise failed to do for
Lagonda Ledge, the sound of the bell accomplished. The first class to
enter the school nicknamed its head “Dean Funnybone,” but this gave him
no shock any more. He had learned the humor of life now, the spirit of
the open land where the view is broad to broadening souls.
And it was to the hand of Dean Fenneben that Professor Vincent Burgess,
A.B., Greek instructor from Boston, and Vic Burleigh, the big country
boy from a claim beyond the Walnut, came on a September day; albeit, the
one had his head in the clouds, while the other's feet were clogged with
the grass roots.