Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/189

 round deep lake of cold clear blue water where the fishing was good. On its banks there was a grove of trees with cottages that were little more than shacks set in their shade. Mary and Michael seemed to know without planning it when the time had come to go to Lakeville for a carouse. Together they would set out on foot to walk the fourteen miles along the county road to the north past Ed Hasselman's farm and Meeker's Gulch. A friend of Mike's, the foreman of the road gang, had a shack there where they could stay. They always took plenty of whiskey with them and left Shamus behind in the shanty. Sometimes they would sleep out of doors on a sand-bar under the moon and sometimes in a rowboat made fast among the lily pads and the tall shaking reeds near the shore. And always there was wild drinking and wilder lovemaking, as if Mary were still a handsome young girl instead of a middle-aged woman bloated and saddled by drink.

And Shamus, left to himself, took to wandering more and more often, and farther and farther. He never slept under a roof. Sometimes if the weather was warm he slept in a thicket or a ditch and if it was cool, among the sheep or among the cattle in the open sheds built in the fields to shelter the beasts from the winter blizzards. The farmers of three counties came to know him and to feed him when he came their way. He was harmless and sometimes he would help them in the fields without asking any pay. He invented games for the children and made them whistles from the willows that grew along the streams and marshes. He did not make them sim-