Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/196

 

It was two years after this almost to the day when Shamus went off for the last time wandering across the country. His mother had been sleeping quietly in the shanty by the railroad-tracks when she was awakened in the middle of the night by the thunder that terrified her. Rising, she began to sprinkle holy water about the shanty and to call upon the saints to protect her. When she went into the kitchen where Shamus slept she found his bed empty. Despite her terror of the storm, she went outside and called his name again and again into the screaming prairie wind. But she got no answer. In the flashes of lightning she found no trace of Shamus but only thick black shadows and the distant lights of the railroad switches. He was gone into the wild storm and she could not find him.

When the sun came up the next morning he did not return and she went to the police, who laughed at her craziness, not knowing what Shamus was to her. They telephoned about the county but no one had seen any trace of him. It was Maria Hazlett who thought where he might be found. That evening when she went to fetch the cows from the pasture by Meeker's Gulch she went into the swamp and there in the thickest part she found him. He was lying on the thick grass, which had been trampled down in a wide circle. He lay on his back in the shadow of the big oak with one arm thrown over his head. His clothes were all torn and the rain had plastered them close to his supple body. His black hair lay in ringlets over the dark forehead.