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lessons. The professor, a hulk named Ollie the Bear, shook his head and rumbled, “Ragtime ain’t your music, boy, never will be. Ragtime is colored music. An’ until you gets to be a colored boy, you ain’t never gonna be able to play it.
Never
. You try an’ take my music…” Ollie spluttered, flung his cigar to the ground, pushed his stubbled face into Brun’s; the boy recoiled from the spray of saliva and the reek of stale tobacco and whiskey. “
Our
music.
Nigger
-music. You think you wanna steal it huh? Uh-uh. Not offa me, you ain’t.” Ollie raised one leg, and blew out a long crescendo of a fart. “Now, go on, boy. Get you’self away from here, an’ leave me be.” Ollie snatched up his cigar, then stomped back into the saloon. Brun dragged his humiliated self home and up to bed.
    His performance in school, never anything to write home about, dropped off to nothing at all. In June, just before the end of the school term, his teacher, Miss Logan, a dried-up little spinster with a face in eternal mourning, called in Brun’s parents and told them in his presence that he had more brains than any other boy in his class, and if he’d only apply himself, he could be a great success. “Music is all he seems to care about.” Miss Logan’s voice left no doubt as to just what kind of music she meant.
    About that time, Brun commenced to think seriously about running away to Sedalia. Find Otis Saunders and Scott Joplin, get one of them to teach him ragtime piano. The idea raged in his brain like wildfire.
    Then, summer. Brun’s father got him a job on Calvin Utley’s farm just outside town. “Time you learned what the world’s really like,” Mr. Campbell said. “Farming’s tough work. It’ll make a man of you.” For more than a month, Brun spent six days a week milking cows, feeding horses, slopping hogs, pulling weeds in the corn patch, and being pecked by chickens who didn’t cotton to the idea of him taking their eggs. After supper, he took a bath and went directly to bed, too fagged to even think of playing piano, and sorer than boils at the looks his parents gave each other.
    One steaming Saturday afternoon, Mr. Utley caught Brun behind the barn, flopped in a shady spot, lollygagging about what it might be like to play piano for a living. Fancy clothes, good money, pretty girls to spend it on… The farmer gave the boy’s ears a cuffing like none before, then sent him off to shovel out the pig stalls. At the end of the day, Brun got no more than one foot inside the house before his mother hustled him out to the back yard and made him strip buck naked while she drew a tub of hot water. He scrubbed himself raw and put on clean clothes, but there was no getting rid of the stink inside his nose. Straightway after supper, he dragged himself up to bed, lowered his head onto the pillow, and became insensible.
    Next he knew, he was awake, clear-minded, at one in the morning. Out of bed in a flash, into his clothes, muscles complaining every which way he turned. But the exhaustion from the day before was gone. Take a little care, he told himself, go easy. It wouldn’t do to wake his parents.
    He sat at the wooden table in the kitchen long enough to write a note. “Dear Ma and Pop. It is not that I don’t love you, or that I’m ungrateful for what you have done for me.” He stopped to think. If his father and mother had any idea where he was headed, the police would likely be waiting to pick him up the minute he arrived. Brun closed his eyes, thought harder. Those stories in the newspapers the old man had been going on about, every night at supper, six months running? Pencil back to paper. “Pa, you always say a man has to strike while an iron is hot. Well, I’m old enough to make my own way now, and I don’t aim just to strike, I mean to strike it big. I’m going to Seattle, then up to the Klondike. When I see you again, I’ll have enough bags full of gold that none of us will ever have to work