Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/162

 Spragg, who did not take the trouble to put on black or put off her flower-trimmed picture hat, tacked up a notice on the front fence that she was going away and that her furniture was for sale. She would have gone perhaps overlooked and in solitude as she had always been, but for the dark rumors which began to be heard. It was said outright that she had killed her brother and that everyone knew that crazy people were far craftier than sane ones. At last a committee from Uriah's own church, feeling perhaps that they were not above suspicion, called upon the sheriff to make an investigation and "clear the honor of Hanna County by fixing the guilt for the murder of the Reverend Uriah Spragg." People, moved perhaps by some dark mistrust, began to hint that the black he-goat had played some part in the crime. No one had found the weapon with which Uriah Spragg had been beaten to death and Joe Hutton, the undertaker, told a story that the wounds on his body were like those that might have been made by the twin prongs of a pair of horns. It was true that since the day of the murder no one had seen the he-goat.

And so they arrested Miss Annie Spragg and questioned her, although they could draw no intelligible story from her muddled and perhaps crafty answers. Next they searched her, calling in two women from Uriah's church to strip her naked. She made no resistance, only looking at them quietly out of her disturbing green eyes. At the very beginning when they took off the white cotton gloves they made a strange discovery. On the palms and the backs of both hands there were red scars, as if