Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/69

 comely one who had spoken to him on the first morning, rushed into the cold water up to her knees, but he turned her back saying, "Until the Lord send you a sign, tend your hearth and your home."

Inside the wagon the wife lay with her face buried in a new feather-bed, her fingers pressed against her ears. She was sobbing and ill and pregnant with another child of the Prophet.

And in the village early in the following summer, the plump blonde woman gave birth to a child which she said was not her husband's child, but the child of God and that she must take it to the Prophet. Some thought her mad and some whispered about her, and her husband hired a woman to keep watch over her while he worked in the fields, but one day when he had gone to Chicago she escaped, and with the child joined a wagon-train bound westward and they never heard of her again.

The tale of Cyrus Spragg is a legend of the flat country, of those prairies of the Middle West where one can travel for days discovering only monotony, and the origin of Cyrus Spragg is as mysterious as his end. No one ever knew whence he came and none knows when he died. There is no record of his grave. Some said that he was a gypsy, but he was far too massive in build for one of the Romany race. Others said that he was the son of a French-Canadian father and a New England mother, and others that he was of German origin, the son of immigrants from the Palatinate,