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Show Anting Alone Page 2gi to an especially megalomaniacal strain of senile dementia and testing out her own miraculous healing powers on the children. Whether or not it actually had been cholera that had claimed her, it probably would have pleased the real historical Pudentiana to know that she was reputed to have succumbed to the same disease that claimed the other strong, pioneer heroes of an even remoter time than her own, the time of the Oregon Trail, whose casualties were buried in the odd corn- and wheat-field all throughout the area that this bus was cruising through today. But one could only speculate as to the true personality of this remarkable woman, for Bopp and his ilk had seen to it that it actually took serious library digging to find out just the mere facts about Mother P. and her times. She'd been a Jungfrau in the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration in Germany in the 1880's, during the time of Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf, when convents all across the land were being shut down, their occupants routed, as un-German. Pudentiana's Tubingen community had sent her, a woman of only nineteen years, across the ocean all by herself to America. Assigned to devote the rest of her earthly life to the setting up of hospitals and new convents, replacements for the ones that the Kaiser and his swaggering "Iron Chancellor" were killing, she'd beaten her way all across this strange nation by stagecoach and on horseback with next to no money in her slip pocket. A miner's daughter, she'd gravitated naturally to the mining camps on the eastern slope of the Rockies, where she and her little plug pony marauded into the towns like a one-woman Mongol horde, bullying the poor miners into setting up schools, to be staffed by |