Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/158

 the long hours of back-breaking work which it imposed upon her. She seemed content with him. She had been an illegitimate child, brought up on the county poor farm, and at eighteen she had gone to work for Ed Hasselman when his wife was still alive. When the wife died Maria Hazlett simply stayed on.

One morning, a day or two after Uriah Spragg had gone off to the annual church convention in Dubuque, Maria Hazlett appeared delivering the milk and as she went from house to house she spread a strange story, telling it alike to hired girls, housewives and men she met in the street. It went through all the town.

She said that in the early morning when Ed Hasselman had gone out to the barn to help her with the milking, he had seen the figure of Miss Annie Spragg black against the sunrise hurrying across the open fields from the direction of Meeker's Gulch and with her was the black he-goat. She was not going toward Meeker's Gulch, mind you, but away from it, back to town. Ed had been drinking a little, Maria Hazlett said, but not enough so that he didn't know what he was seeing.

Some put the story down as a drunken hallucination of the milkman and others guarded it, turning it over in their minds, savoring all its possibilities, but in the end everyone came to know it and it served only to deepen the isolation which surrounded the strange brother and sister. They came to be looked upon a little as though they were strange animals brought from a far country, which might be regarded safely from a distance. Here and there in