One evening while his wife slept her laudanum sleep, the Professor called his daughters from their narrow rooms, walls pasted with photogravures, inspirational poems, and their own accomplished sketches. Into the hands of Muriel, Ethel, Jenny, Mabel, he placed gold coins, $200 apiece. “Hide these,” he said. “It’s what ye’ll have from our selling the dear homeplace. Your mother will never travel again. This must be your dowry. No matter what awaits us on ahead, I will never ask you for it. And if I somehow do, you’re never to surrender it, ye hear me?” Then Fraser quoted his correspondent and onetime houseguest, John Ruskin, “‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.’ Girls, continually SEE yourselves. Know you were born to be more … than mere Americans.”

As the sisters, arms around one another, sat watching, Papa overwound his pocket watch while reciting Bobby Burns in roiling Gaelic. It was a language the daughters had already most cleanly forgot. Weeping, the gentleman feigned a coughing fit, then rushed out for a walk along a great lake he pretended, late at night, to be the surging River Clyde.

The more fuddled Professor Fraser became, the louder did he praise his eldest girl as “the son I never had.” To Muriel he ceded household accounts once kept by her mother; to Muriel he confided his daily shame; he told every fact learned belatedly about the imprisoned author of those Westerns that’d tricked him into sacrificing his wife and virgin daughters to some idea of an American future. “One assumes a writer knows whereof he speaks, that he’s traveled farther than some atlas copied in a jail cell,” Donald Fraser complained about Karl May’s deception. But the more gossip he collected concerning the writer’s woes (May had been blinded from birth until age five by nothing worse than malnutrition), the more allied he felt with a fellow victim. Untenured, Donald Fraser—alias “Raffles” of The Racing News—could only envy May’s speed, his caliber of well-paying pulp.

Within too few years, Fraser had sent all his girls into the world to earn their keep; for him, this tragedy outweighed the accident itself. To fare badly in Scotland was unseemly if melancholic, familiar; but “Perfesser” Fraser, as they called him here, soon understood that in America there was no curse, no comparison to lowly body parts, no blighting word as wicked as plain “failure.” It rendered you and yours prairie Untouchables.