Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/164

 the rights of a citizen like themselves, but a kind of monster who filled them with a hungry desire to destroy her. There seems to have been an unnatural intensity in their feeling against her. She was to them no longer a woman, or even human. At length three bold citizens in an excess of virtue broke down the fence built so laboriously by the hand of Miss Annie Spragg herself to shelter her pets, and there on the beaten yellow earth they found what they sought—three great stains made by blood.

It was then that old Mrs. Bosanky, for once sober and in her right mind, pushed through the crowd and told her story. Miss Annie Spragg, she said, could not have committed the murder because she, Mrs. Bosanky, had been in the house all day on the day that Uriah Spragg was found beaten to death on the edge of the county road. She took her oath to it, calling upon the Virgin Mary and all the Irish saints to witness that she was telling the truth. She explained delicately that she had not told her story until now because the murder had upset her and since then she had been drinking a little in order to quiet herself.

But the blood—She could explain that too. It was the blood of the pretty black he-goat. On the morning of the day the Reverend Uriah Spragg was murdered, he had killed it himself with an axe.

Since they could find nothing against Miss Annie Spragg save that she was a little moonstruck, they