Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/185

 life of a man, save that she was always virtuous because rooted deep in her savage and superstitious nature there was a fear of priests and of the life after death. She was terrified of thunderstorms and of corpses and heard strange noises in the night. There were no even, monotonous plains of contentment in her life. Her mood was either one in which she went all day singing ballads from her home county or one in which she went about praying and moaning and saying her rosary. At the age of twenty-eight she found herself washing dishes in Rafferty's saloon and lunch-room on the edge of Winnebago Falls where the tracks of the Iowa, Nebraska and Western Railroad crossed those of the Trans-Mississippi Freight and Passenger Company. In those days they were building railroads everywhere and it was always the Irish who did the work, so Rafferty's saloon was filled a large part of the time with wild Irishmen drinking and carousing in the hours when they were not shoveling earth and stone to bring prosperity to sleepy places like Winnebago Falls.

Among the Irishmen was one Michael Bosanky, a great red-haired giant of a fellow two years older than Mary, who drank and roared and sought to make life constantly more exciting than it could possibly be. He was a devil with the ladies and he tried to be a devil with Mary, but she would have none of him save on the terms that the priests held holy and respectable, and in the end the banns were