Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/75

74 Mighty religious-looking picture for a home whose occupants would—

And we did set a good table. We had plenty of apple butter and jelly and yellow tomato preserves and peach butter and all kind so jam and picked peaches and canned pears, and dried apples—schnitts—and everything else edible. Besides, we kept a flock of cows and mother was a mistress of the art of dairying. Many and many a night I sat beside her churn after dusk in the entrance to the hillside cellar, listening to her working the dash up and down to the rhythmic accompaniment of Scott's "Lady of the Lake" or "Marmion"; or do the churning myself while she sat on her bare feet (she was a more than half wild woman) and recited Campbell's "Hohenlinden" or "The Ritter Bann from Hungary came back renowned in arms," etc. She wasn't the sort of woman one would pick as a conspirator in taking human life, however. But how can one tell? One knows so little of the inner workings even of those with whom one is most intimate.

Thompson was a quiet man with brown whiskers and a nose that turned up a little. He had blue eyes. I can see him yet. He has a way of sitting, on the cool spring evenings, and staring into the fire that father would have one of us boys build to keep off the chill. There was, as I now see, nothing else for Thompson to have done. The coal-oil lamp didn't give a very good reading light; there was no lamp for the spare room; and we children—I in particular—sat and stared so hard at the man that he couldn't keep his countenance. He was a stranger, and any stranger was mysterious to me. I would sit and look at him for half an hour at a time, endowing him imaginarily with all sorts of miraculous attributes and surrounding him with an aura of dramatic possibilities. It was no fun for Thompson, as I now realize, to be goggled at by a small, freckled boy with mouth and eyes both hanging open.

Now and then he talked. Father was a great pumper. His cross-examination of strangers, of whom he was always wistfully suspicious, was something to listen to and for mother to scold him about afterwards. One night in a burst of confidence, Thompson told us his first name was Charley, his wife's maiden name was Lewis, he lived at Frost Station, over in Athens county, he had a brother-in-law named Lewis (his wife's brother). He referred to the fact that Thompson and Lewis were two very common names. I thought a great deal about that. It has stuck in my mind through all these years as if there were something really significant or important in the statement.

Thompson would disappear early in the day and go to Jack Garret's, Billy Gordon's, Levi Halderman's, Joe Armstrong's or Eli Tope's or somewhere else in the vicinity, looking for the sort of timber that would make spokes and rims for wagon and buggy wheels. Now and then, when he would return in the evening, he would mention that he had found enough for a "cah". It was in that way he referred to a car-load lot of his sort of timber. It would need, he told us, to be seasoned for a year or so after cutting, before it would be ready to make into wheel timbers. I can hear him yet saying he had "found enough to staht a cah". He had no other dialectic tricks, and his "staht a cah" sounded strangely to me. Had it been today I might have accused him of plain affectation. But then I didn't. It was a part of Thompson, the stranger. It seems to me now he was never out of my thoughts, waking or sleeping, from the time he came till now, forty years later.

One day he announced that he was going to Jackson or Wellston to meet his workmen, whom he had arranged for my mail, to come and start cutting