Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/193

 sat eating and listening shyly on the edge of the stone coping about the spring.

He finished his supper and as it grew darker he got up presently and began to dance, not any set dance, but a series of steps which he had made up himself. It was a dance composed mostly of mad leapings and caperings so violent that remains of his ragged clothes fell apart leaving him naked to the waist under the hot August moon. Ed Hasselman drinking more and more, gave Shamus more and more to drink and played the concertina more and more wildly while Shamus danced with his black curling hair flying about his dark face. And all the while Maria, her work finished, sat on a milking stool watching the whole scene with a face on which there showed neither astonishment nor interest. She accepted the scene just as she had appeared to accept everything since she had left the poorhouse as an orphan and gone out into the world. Thus she had accepted the long trial of Ed Hasselman's drunkenness and the discovery years earlier of the body of Uriah Spragg in the ditch by the county road.

At length Ed Hasselman became too drunk to play and Shamus grew weary of his dancing and the two of them sat quietly drinking and looking at the moon. And presently Shamus told them the story which no one in Winnebago Falls ever believed because they said that Shamus was a half-wit and that Ed Hasselman was drunk. But Maria Hazlett was not drunk. She never drank. She simply sat there listening quietly. She was content with her world as she found it. 