Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/187

 her and they pitied her hard life, but it never occurred to Mary to pity herself. Michael never chased after other women any longer. He seemed to find her enough for him.

And presently when Mary became a little weary of Michael's perpetual drunkenness she began, too, to drink and life at once became brighter. They drank together and the fights they had were magnificent. Sometimes one emerged with a blackened eye and sometimes the other and sometimes both. She began to grow undependable among the best families of Winnebago Falls and so to lose her work.

When she was thirty-nine something happened which Mary regarded as a miracle. For nine years she had prayed to all the saints of fertility and now at thirty-nine she was going to have a baby. On the advice of the priest she even gave up drinking, which was for Mary a great sacrifice. The child was born in the two-room shack by the railroad. It was a pretty baby, a boy, curiously strong and healthy, with black hair and blue eyes like herself. He was strong enough even to survive the rough treatment that was certain to meet any child born into the world of Bosanky's Shanty. She called him Shamus after her father from whom she had not heard in fifteen years. As he grew older he was slow in walking and in making himself understood.

But when Shamus was old enough to go to the parish school it was clear that there was something wrong with him. He did not learn things like other children and he could remember nothing of his lessons. He was not an idiot. It was more as if there