His name was not really Buzz, but quotes are dispensed with because no
one but his mother remembered what it originally had been. His mother
called him Ernie and she alone, in all Chippewa, Wisconsin, was unaware
that her son was the town tough guy. But even she sometimes mildly
remonstrated with him for being what she called kind of wild. Buzz had
yellow hair with a glint in it, and it curled up into a bang at the
front. No amount of wetting or greasing could subdue that irrepressible
forelock. A boy with hair like that never grows up in his mother's
eyes.

If Buzz's real name was lost in the dim mists of boyhood, the origin and
fitness of his nickname were apparent after two minutes' conversation
with him. Buzz Werner was called Buzz not only because he talked too
much, but because he was a braggart. His conversation bristled with the
perpendicular pronoun, and his pet phrase was, "I says to him--"

He buzzed.

By the time Buzz was fourteen he was stealing brass from the yards of
the big paper mills down in the Flats and selling it to the junk man.
How he escaped the reform school is a mystery. Perhaps it was the blond
forelock. At nineteen he was running with the Kearney girl.

Twenty-five years hence Chippewa will have learned to treat the
Kearney-girl type as a disease, and a public menace. Which she was. The
Kearney girl ran wild in Chippewa, and Chippewa will be paying taxes on
the fruit of her liberty for a hundred years to come. The Kearney girl
was a beautiful idiot, with a lovely oval face, and limpid, rather
wistful blue eyes, and fair, fine hair, and a long slim neck. She looked
very much like those famous wantons of history, from Lucrezia Borgia to