Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/153

 settled down in apathy along the mud flats. They were a poor lot, undernourished, superstitious and fearful. Most of them could not read or write, but they were all Children of God who possessed souls, and Uriah, whose only ambition was atonement, took up his task without complaint.

The preacher's house stood on the outskirts of the town, a poor wooden affair like the church, half hidden from a highway which was neither city street nor country road, by great cottonwoods and a thicket of untended lilacs, syringas and woodbine. Great clumps of burdock, emblem of poverty and the sordid, had taken possession of the yard and grew close against the old house. Beyond it stretched an abandoned terrain grown over with sumach and wild cherries, which in summer served mercifully to hide the fragments of old buggies and baby-carriages, tin cans and bicycles, dumped there when they ceased to be any longer of use to the citizens of Winnebago Falls.

Into this house Uriah and Annie Spragg moved the few primitive things which made up their household furniture. The pay was three hundred dollars a year and "contributions," but "contributions" from a flock which itself lingered on the fringes of starvation could not have been great. Still they were for a little time secure and safe from change, since it was impossible to assign Uriah to a lower charge.

Not long after they had moved in, Annie Spragg was discovered foraging along the river and on the fringes of the dump heap, collecting bits of wood. With these she constructed by her own hands a crude