Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/192

 

The rest of the tale comes from Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett who kept house for him on the farm near Meeker's Gulch. Their part of it happened long after Uriah Spragg was murdered and Annie, questioned and tormented, had been allowed to disappear.

Since Shamus had first run off as a little boy he had been friendly with Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett. They always fed him and took no notice of his goings and comings, and from the first they seemed to accept him without question. Sometimes he stayed about the farm for days sleeping among the animals and helping in the fields. He was a great help to Maria Hazlett at the periods when Ed retired into drunkenness. At the time he told them the story he was thirty-four years old. It was only a little time before his death.

It was at the beginning of one of Ed Hasselman's spells and Shamus appeared one evening just at dusk out of the woods back of the house. They had finished supper and the milking was over and Maria was washing the cream separator and the milk crocks outside the kitchen door under the great catalpa tree that grew there. As the sun had gone down a great burning harvest moon came heavily up out of the prairie and Ed on the doorstep with a flagon of hard cider beside him sat playing on his concertina snatches of half forgotten tunes that he had heard as a child in Dorfsweiler, his father's village of the Black Forest. Maria got Shamus some cold ham and some hard cider and bread and cheese and he