Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/22

 The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them from him and swore.

"She needn't think she's so damned swell," she said. "What's she got to make her so proud? I should think she'd blush at what has happened in that rotten old house. Why, she's got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for neighbors!"

She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.

With a loud, officious bang, Hennery closed the wrought iron gates and the wise, old faces of the alien women pressed once more against the bars. One of the throng—the big boy with the shock of yellow hair, a Ukrainian named Stepan Krylenko—shouted something in Russian as the gates banged together. It was a tongue foreign to Hennery but from the look in the fierce blue eye of the young fellow, the negro understood that what he said was not friendly. The women admonished the boy and fell to whispering in awe among themselves, but the offender in no way modified his manner. When Judge Weissman, fat and perspiring and covered with jewelry, whirled past him in a phaeton a moment later, the boy shouted in Russian, "Jew! Dirty Jew!" Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, "These foreigners are getting too free in their manners. . . . The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of these days. . . . There ought to be a law against letting them into the country."

The Judge was angry, although his anger was stirred not by the shout of Stepan Krylenko but by the fact that Julia Shane had become suddenly blind as his phaeton swept round the corner of the old house. The shout was something upon which to fasten his anger.