Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/74

 not included among those he sired after he ruled as God in New Jerusalem.

The wife, it seemed, could not bring herself to leave him, perhaps because without him she could not have fed all those mouths, perhaps because in the end, after he had come to believe in himself, she, too, began to believe that he might be God. Or it may have been a thing even simpler and less complex, that he had for her that fascination which he had for other women, like Miss Amelia Bossert and the yellow-haired wife.

The children had Biblical names—Jared and Obadiah, Vashti and Uriah, Solomon and Bathsheba, Joshua and Isaiah, Boaz and Sulamith, Abraham and Ishmael—all save the last. For some reason the tired woman rebelled against giving the last a Biblical name. Perhaps it was because she had some foreknowledge that she would never have another child and so sought to have one that might be her own instead of his. Perhaps she knew even before it was born that the last child was destined to be strange and different from the others.

The child was born one hot August night in a cottonwood grove in Iowa. There was a clear sky with a red moon that came up out of the flat prairie as the sun disappeared. The tired woman felt the pains coming on and begged her husband to stop for the night among the pleasant trees. She could not bear a child far out alone on that flat monotonous plain with not even a bush to hide her agony. And when she had seen to it that the smaller children were asleep and the older ones had wandered off among the trees, she went with Cyrus Spragg