Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/75

 deep into the grove until they came to a swamp bordered round with deep thickets of witch-hazel, and there in the wildest corner they made a bed of leaves and blankets under the trees and Cyrus heated water in an iron pot.

Her pain lasted all through the night, to the wild accompaniment of frogs croaking in the marshes and white herons moving about and chortling in their sleep. A single coyote somewhere on the edge of the marsh sat on his haunches and bayed at the moon, long quivering wails that came surely from another world. It seemed that the child would never be born and that surely she must die, but when morning came and the moon had disappeared and only Venus hung red in the pale East, Cyrus Spragg tore the child from its mother's womb. It was a girl and it lived, but the tired mother knew she could never have another child.

They baptized the baby in the waters of the marsh, giving it the name of Annie, which was the name of Maria Spragg's mother.

In the years that followed, revelations that were false came from time to time to the Prophet. Once he returned from meditation in the wilderness declaring that God had come to him in a pillar of fire to say that mankind could alone be saved by turning again to the ways of the birds and the beasts of the field. There must be no more marrying or giving in marriage and man must go about clothed only in his skin, like the birds and the beasts. Sin, God told