Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/114

 

At the time they came to Cordova Annie Spragg was possessed of a strange wild beauty that passed for plainness among the women of the place because it had none of the chromo-like prettiness for which their starved souls had a craving. More discerning and worldly critics would have discovered in her figure and in her sly face a mysterious excitement that stirred what was deepest and most carnal in man. Of all the thirteen legitimate children of the Prophet she alone appeared to have been touched by the same unholy power which he came to understand so well and to exploit with such profit. The two eldest sons had it not, for their joint imposture of the Prophet had been discovered soon enough by the women of the Saint's colony. They were not men enough to fill their father's shoes.

She was of middle height with red hair, not the nondescript sandy red of Uriah's hair, but a deep flaming red as her mother's hair had been on the day the Prophet first saw her in her father's cabin at St. Louis before she had borne thirteen children in fifteen years; and her skin was not pale and freckled like Uriah's, but of that waxen green-white to be found in the women of Titian. Her figure at twenty-four was slim, but possessed of curves which even stiff skirts and coarse black cloth could not conceal. Her eyes were greenish and of an odd almond shape, slanting upward at the outer corners; and her mouth was the mouth of the Prophet himself, red and full-blooded and voluptuous, with a disturbing power of excitement. She had a gliding,