Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/111

 ing river whose waters were red with the fertility of the earth. To the south there extended a great area of land that had once been only a vast marsh, but with the passing of centuries the slow-moving river had cut itself deeper and deeper into the soil, draining the marsh and leaving it dry with a caked peat-like surface which burned slowly with the flameless intensity of rotten wood. In the seventies there was so much rich land to be had that no one paused on his way west to claim any of the bog, and when the peat-like surface took fire it was allowed to burn until drowned by the flood-like rains of the spring. Always there was some part of the bog asmoulder, sending up great columns of white smoke. The sight provided variety in a landscape that otherwise was insanely monotonous. Sometimes the soil burned in a dozen places at once so that the whole countryside to the south of Cordova took on the aspect of Hell, and sometimes in the fantastic damp heat of the prairie summers there appeared in it the mirages of lakes that seemed made of smouldering brimstone. The water in wells of that flat country was stale and flat and without life.

It was to this town that Uriah Spragg and his sister Annie came on the death of their mother, for Uriah had set his mind on becoming a preacher of the Primitive Methodist faith and to thus atone for the colossal sins of his father, the Prophet. And Uriah Spragg was no longer a young man and he knew now that there was much to atone for. He planned after he was ordained to go from place to place in a wagon as his father had done, preaching