Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips.  She was tall and strong.  When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists.  She worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store.  She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street.  The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees.  A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her.  The bookkeeper’s life was made up of innumerable little pettinesses.  When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age.  At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca coat.  Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets.  He had invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose.  The trousers to his street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped together with heavy screws.  In the morning he wiped the boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining room door.  If they were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.  She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it.  One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house.  With the mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George Willard.  Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much anxiety.  She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith’s Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.  She did not think that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender and walked about under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her nature.  She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds.  About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith’s saloon.  His fists were large and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in Indiana.  When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six months.  Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe.  Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars.  One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing.  With his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted to nothing.  He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her company.  On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer’s livery barn and took her for a drive.  The conviction that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon him and he told her of his desires.  The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his intentions.  His body ached with physical longing and with his body he expressed himself.  Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became helpless.  Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the buggy.  “When I get hold of you again I’ll not let you go.  You can’t play with me,” he declared as he turned to drive away.  Then, jumping out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands.  “I’ll keep you for good the next time,” he said.  “You might as well make up your mind to that.  It’s you and me for it and I’m going to have you before I get through.”

One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was in Ed Handby’s mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter, went for a walk.  Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck’s pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher.  Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent, but George Willard talked.  The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they talked of women.  The young reporter got into that vein.  He said that women should look out for themselves, that the fellow who went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened.  As he talked he looked about, eager for attention.  He held the floor for five minutes and then Art Wilson began to talk.  Art was learning the barber’s trade in Cal Prouse’s shop and already began to consider himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing, drinking, and going about with women.  He began to tell of a night when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the county seat.  The butcher’s son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor.  “The women in the place couldn’t embarrass me although they tried hard enough,” he boasted.  “One of the girls in the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her.  As soon as she began to talk I went and sat in her lap.  Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her.  I taught her to let me alone.”

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street.  For days the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely.  Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do, George went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his companions of the pool room.  Because it was dark and he was alone he began to talk aloud.  In a spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that jingled as he walked.  As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long line of men who stood at attention.  He began to examine the accoutrements of the men.  Before a tree he stopped and began to scold.  “Your pack is not in order,” he said sharply.  “How many times will I have to speak of this matter?  Everything must be in order here.  We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be done without order.”

Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board sidewalk saying more words.  “There is a law for armies and for men too,” he muttered, lost in reflection.  “The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything.  In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts.  I myself must be orderly.  I must learn that law.  I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star.  In my little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body began to tremble.  He had never before thought such thoughts as had just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from.  For the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he walked.  He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor.  “To come out of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and think things like that,” he whispered.  “It is better to be alone.  If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been thinking down here.”

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a section in which lived day laborers.  As the time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the railroads.  They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the long day of toil.  The houses in which they lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back.  The more comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked into such a street on the clear January night.  The street was dimly lighted and in places there was no sidewalk.  In the scene that lay about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy.  For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence.  On an impulse he turned out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came to him.  The very rankness of the smell of manure in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain.  The poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children crying ­all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the alleyway.  A dog attacked him and had to be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of the houses and swore at the dog.  George went into a vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the sky.  He felt unutterably big and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head and muttering words.  The desire to say words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning.  “Death,” he muttered, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.”

George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the sidewalk facing the houses.  He felt that all of the people in the little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.  “If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we would run until we were both tired out,” he thought.  “That would make me feel better.”  With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived.  He thought she would understand his mood and that he could achieve in her presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve.  In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away filled with anger at himself.  He had felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling.  Now he thought he had suddenly become too big to be used.

When George got to Belle Carpenter’s house there had already been a visitor there before him.  Ed Handby had come to the door and calling Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her.  He had wanted to ask the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen.  “You stay away from that kid,” he growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away.  “If I catch you together I will break your bones and his too,” he added.  The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly upstairs.  From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed Handby cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a neighbor.  In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in his hands.  She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat.  She thought that, as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under the trees in the sweet night air.  George Willard was full of big words.  The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness in the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering along and swinging his arms about.  He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had changed.  “You’ll find me different,” he declared, thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking boldly into her eyes.  “I don’t know why but it is so.  You’ve got to take me for a man or let me alone.  That’s how it is.”

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the boy.  When George had finished talking they turned down a side street and went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill.  The hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg Fair Grounds.  On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and among the bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard’s heart began to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened.  Suddenly he decided that Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him.  The new force that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon her and had led to her conquest.  The thought made him half drunk with the sense of masculine power.  Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she had accompanied him to this place took all his doubts away.  “It is different.  Everything has become different,” he thought and taking hold of her shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist.  When he kissed her upon the lips she leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the darkness.  In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting.  Again, as in the alleyway, George Willard’s mind ran off into words and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the words into the still night.  “Lust,” he whispered, “lust and night and women.”

George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on the hillside.  Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and then grew half insane with anger and hate.  He hated Belle Carpenter and was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her.  On the hillside he had led the woman to one of the little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her.  As in the vacant lot, by the laborers’ houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for the new power in himself and was waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to take his woman away.  He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists.  Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held him with one hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass.  Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet.  “You’re no good,” he said roughly.  “I’ve half a mind not to bother with you.  I’d let you alone if I didn’t want you so much.”

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think.  He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated him.  To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes.  The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but George Willard’s head struck the root of a tree and he lay still.  Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes.  As he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him.  He hated himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.  When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the voice outside himself that had so short a time before put new courage into his heart.  When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

“Queer”

From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr on the rear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle.  Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes.  They did not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off.  With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings.  Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg, standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and staring absentmindedly about.  “Well, well, what next!” exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the window.

A flush crept into Elmer Cowley’s face and his hands began to tremble.  In Cowley & Son’s store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the counter talking to his father.  He imagined the reporter could hear what was being said and the thought made him furious.  With one of the shoes still held in his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot upon the board floor.

Cowley & Son’s store did not face the main street of Winesburg.  The front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight’s wagon shop and a shed for the sheltering of farmers’ horses.  Beside the store an alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and down.  The store itself was indescribable.  Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything and nothing.  In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and beside the black mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and dirty in their wooden frames.

The honey had stood in the store window for six months.  It was for sale as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof paint, bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that companioned the honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.

Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall and lean and looked unwashed.  On his scrawny neck was a large wen partially covered by a grey beard.  He wore a long Prince Albert coat.  The coat had been purchased to serve as a wedding garment.  Before he became a merchant Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore the Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons when he came into town to trade.  When he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the coat constantly.  It had become brown with age and was covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.

As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not been happily placed as a farmer.  Still he existed.  His family, consisting of a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the store and it did not cost them much to live.  His troubles were not financial.  His unhappiness as a merchant lay in the fact that when a traveling man with wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid.  Behind the counter he stood shaking his head.  He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to buy and thus lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he would not be stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what could not be sold.

In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard standing and apparently listening at the back door of the Eagle printshop, a situation had arisen that always stirred the son’s wrath.  The traveling man talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty.  “You see how quickly it is done,” said the traveling man, who had for sale a small flat metal substitute for collar buttons.  With one hand he quickly unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again.  He assumed a flattering wheedling tone.  “I tell you what, men have come to the end of all this fooling with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out of the change that is coming.  I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town.  Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I’ll not visit any other store.  I’ll leave the field to you.”

The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on Ebenezer’s breast.  “It’s an opportunity and I want you to take it,” he urged.  “A friend of mine told me about you.  ’See that man Cowley,’ he said.  ‘He’s a live one.’”

The traveling man paused and waited.  Taking a book from his pocket he began writing out the order.  Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass showcase near the front door.  He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it about.  “You get out of here!” he shrieked.  “We don’t want any collar fasteners here.”  An idea came to him.  “Mind, I’m not making any threat,” he added.  “I don’t say I’ll shoot.  Maybe I just took this gun out of the case to look at it.  But you better get out.  Yes sir, I’ll say that.  You better grab up your things and get out.”

The young storekeeper’s voice rose to a scream and going behind the counter he began to advance upon the two men.  “We’re through being fools here!” he cried.  “We ain’t going to buy any more stuff until we begin to sell.  We ain’t going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and listening.  You get out of here!”

The traveling man left.  Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the counter into a black leather bag, he ran.  He was a small man and very bow-legged and he ran awkwardly.  The black bag caught against the door and he stumbled and fell.  “Crazy, that’s what he is ­crazy!” he sputtered as he arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.

In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other.  Now that the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was embarrassed.  “Well, I meant it.  I think we’ve been queer long enough,” he declared, going to the showcase and replacing the revolver.  Sitting on a barrel he pulled on and fastened the shoe he had been holding in his hand.  He was waiting for some word of understanding from his father but when Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the wrath in the son and the young man ran out of the store without replying.  Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he had confronted the traveling man.  “I’ll be starched,” he said softly.  “Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched!”

Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that paralleled the railroad track.  He did not know where he was going or what he was going to do.  In the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after turning sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped and the passion that had been the cause of his outburst in the store began to again find expression.  “I will not be queer ­one to be looked at and listened to,” he declared aloud.  “I’ll be like other people.  I’ll show that George Willard.  He’ll find out.  I’ll show him!”

The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared back at the town.  He did not know the reporter George Willard and had no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the town news.  The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and in the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young merchant’s mind.  He thought the boy who passed and repassed Cowley & Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him.  George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town.  Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind.  Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness?  Did he not walk whistling and laughing through Main Street?  Might not one by striking his person strike also the greater enemy ­the thing that smiled and went its own way ­the judgment of Winesburg?

Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and powerful.  His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness.  His teeth protruded from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.  Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends.  He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the thought.

Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets.  The day was cold with a raw wind, but presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy.  The tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt and the mud clung to Elmer’s shoes.  His feet became cold.  When he had gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood.  In the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in mind.

For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds.  A smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who was husking corn in one of the fields.

In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to whom he felt he could explain himself.  The man on the farm was a half-witted old fellow named Mook.  He had once been employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm when it was sold.  The old man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered about all day in the fields.

Mook the half-wit lived happily.  With childlike faith he believed in the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard.  He it was who had put the expression regarding being “laundered” into the mouth of his former employer.  When excited or surprised by anything he smiled vaguely and muttered:  “I’ll be washed and ironed.  Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched.”

When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially interested in the sudden appearance of the young man.  His feet also were cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth and apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.

Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and waving his arms about.  “You don’t understand what’s the matter with me so of course you don’t care,” he declared.  “With me it’s different.  Look how it has always been with me.  Father is queer and mother was queer, too.  Even the clothes mother used to wear were not like other people’s clothes, and look at that coat in which father goes about there in town, thinking he’s dressed up, too.  Why don’t he get a new one?  It wouldn’t cost much.  I’ll tell you why.  Father doesn’t know and when mother was alive she didn’t know either.  Mabel is different.  She knows but she won’t say anything.  I will, though.  I’m not going to be stared at any longer.  Why look here, Mook, father doesn’t know that his store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he’ll never sell the stuff he buys.  He knows nothing about it.  Sometimes he’s a little worried that trade doesn’t come and then he goes and buys something else.  In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will come after a while.  He isn’t worried.  He’s queer.  He doesn’t know enough to be worried.”

The excited young man became more excited.  “He don’t know but I know,” he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of the half-wit.  “I know too well.  I can’t stand it.  When we lived out here it was different.  I worked and at night I went to bed and slept.  I wasn’t always seeing people and thinking as I am now.  In the evening, there in town, I go to the post office or to the depot to see the train come in, and no one says anything to me.  Everyone stands around and laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me.  Then I feel so queer that I can’t talk either.  I go away.  I don’t say anything.  I can’t.”

The fury of the young man became uncontrollable.  “I won’t stand it,” he yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees.  “I’m not made to stand it.”

Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the town of Winesburg.  “Go on back to work,” he screamed.  “What good does it do me to talk to you?” A thought came to him and his voice dropped.  “I’m a coward too, eh?” he muttered.  “Do you know why I came clear out here afoot?  I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell.  I hunted out another queer one, you see.  I ran away, that’s what I did.  I couldn’t stand up to someone like that George Willard.  I had to come to you.  I ought to tell him and I will.”

Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about.  “I will tell him.  I won’t be queer.  I don’t care what they think.  I won’t stand it.”

Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the log before the fire.  Presently the old man arose and climbing over the fence went back to his work in the corn.  “I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he declared.  “Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed.”  Mook was interested.  He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood nibbling at a straw stack.  “Elmer was here,” he said to the cows.  “Elmer is crazy.  You better get behind the stack where he don’t see you.  He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will.”

At eight o’clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front door of the office of the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat writing.  His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined look was on his face.  “You come on outside with me,” he said, stepping in and closing the door.  He kept his hand on the knob as though prepared to resist anyone else coming in.  “You just come along outside.  I want to see you.”

George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of Winesburg.  The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat and looked very spruce and dressed up.  He thrust his hands into the overcoat pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion.  He had long been wanting to make friends with the young merchant and find out what was in his mind.  Now he thought he saw a chance and was delighted.  “I wonder what he’s up to?  Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for the paper.  It can’t be a fire because I haven’t heard the fire bell and there isn’t anyone running,” he thought.

In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove at the back of some store.  The windows of the stores were frosted and the wind rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the stairway leading to Doctor Welling’s office.  Before Hern’s Grocery a basket of apples and a rack filled with new brooms stood on the sidewalk.  Elmer Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard.  He tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down.  His face worked spasmodically.  He seemed about to shout.  “Oh, you go on back,” he cried.  “Don’t stay out here with me.  I ain’t got anything to tell you.  I don’t want to see you at all.”

For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his failure to declare his determination not to be queer.  Bitterly the sense of defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep.  After the hours of futile sputtering at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and his failure in the presence of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope of a future for himself.

And then a new idea dawned for him.  In the darkness that surrounded him he began to see a light.  Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley & Son had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept stealthily in and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the rear.  In the barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley & Son’s cash.  Every evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel when he closed the store and went upstairs to bed.  “They wouldn’t never think of a careless place like that,” he told himself, thinking of robbers.

Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of the farm.  Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly out at the front door and walked again in the streets.

The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was very simple.  “I will get out of here, run away from home,” he told himself.  He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at midnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn.  He would steal a ride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowds there.  He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable.  Then he could talk and laugh.  He would no longer be queer and would make friends.  Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had for others.

The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George Willard.  He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter before he left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps challenge him, challenge all of Winesburg through him.

Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard House and pounded on the door.  A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the office.  He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore with pride the title of “night clerk.”  Before the boy Elmer was bold, insistent.  “You ’wake him up,” he commanded.  “You tell him to come down by the depot.  I got to see him and I’m going away on the local.  Tell him to dress and come on down.  I ain’t got much time.”

The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their flight east.  George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity.  “Well, here I am.  What do you want?  You’ve got something to tell me, eh?” he said.

Elmer tried to explain.  He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at the train that had begun to groan and get under way.  “Well, you see,” he began, and then lost control of his tongue.  “I’ll be washed and ironed.  I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half incoherently.

Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness on the station platform.  Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and down before his eyes.  Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket he thrust them into George Willard’s hand.  “Take them,” he cried.  “I don’t want them.  Give them to father.  I stole them.”  With a snarl of rage he turned and his long arms began to flay the air.  Like one struggling for release from hands that held him he struck out, hitting George Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth.  The young reporter rolled over on the platform half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the blows.  Springing aboard the passing train and running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the fallen man in the darkness.  Pride surged up in him.  “I showed him,” he cried.  “I guess I showed him.  I ain’t so queer.  I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer.”