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stone girls to be thought pretty. Anna's nature was con-
ventional, like her face. Her position as the minister's
eldest daughter was important to her, and she tried to
live up to it. She read sentimental religious story-books
and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous
behavior of their persecuted heroines. Everything had to
be interpreted for Anna. Her opinions about the small-
est and most commonplace things were gleaned from the
Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and
Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attrac-
tive to her in its natural state--indeed, scarcely anything
was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some
authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love,
marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular
quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies
of human living. She discussed all these subjects with other
Methodist girls of her age. They would spend hours, for
instance, in deciding what they would or would not toler-
ate in a suitor or a husband, and the frailties of masculine
nature were too often a subject of discussion among them.
In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except
where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious,
with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had
really shocking habits of classification. The wickedness of
Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied
her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy that
goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy
curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.
Thea, and all Thea's ways and friends, seemed indecor-
ous to Anna. She not only felt a grave social discrimination
against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish
Johnny was a drunkard and that "nobody knew what he
did when he ran away from home." Thea pretended, of
course, that she liked the Mexicans because they were
fond of music; but every one knew that music was no-
thing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl's re-
lations with people. What was real, then, and what did
matter? Poor Anna!
Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of
steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he
was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor
with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she won-
dered what such an exemplary young man found to like in
Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his
position in Moonstone, but she KNEW he had kissed the
Mexican barytone's pretty daughter, and she had a whole
DOSSIER of evidence about his behavior in his hours of relax-
ation in Denver. He was "fast," and it was because he was
"fast" that Thea liked him. Thea always liked that kind
of people. Dr. Archie's whole manner with Thea, Anna
often told her mother, was too free. He was always putting
his hand on Thea's head, or holding her hand while he
laughed and looked down at her. The kindlier manifesta-
tion of human nature (about which Anna sang and talked,
in the interests of which she went to conventions and wore
white ribbons) were never realities to her after all. She did
not believe in them. It was only in attitudes of protest or
reproof, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be
even temporarily decent.
Preacher Kronborg's secret convictions were very much
like Anna's. He believed that his wife was absolutely good,
but there was not a man or woman in his congregation
whom he trusted all the way.
Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find
something to admire in almost any human conduct that
was positive and energetic. She could always be taken
in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys. She went
to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were
"likely good enough women in their way." She admired
Dr. Archie's fine physique and well-cut clothes as much
as Thea did, and said she "felt it was a privilege to be
handled by such a gentleman when she was sick."
Soon after Anna became a church member she began to
remonstrate with Thea about practicing--playing "secu-
lar music"--on Sunday. One Sunday the dispute in the
parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in
the kitchen. She listened judicially and told Anna to read
the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted
to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Thea went back to
the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in
the right, her mother should have supported her.
"No," said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, "I can't
see it that way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and
I don't see as I should keep Thea from it. I like to hear her,
and I guess your father does. You and Thea will likely fol-
low different lines, and I don't see as I'm called upon to
bring you up alike."
Anna looked meek and abused. "Of course all the church
people must hear her. Ours is the only noisy house on this
street. You hear what she's playing now, don't you?"
Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. "Yes;
it's the Blue Danube waltzes. I'm familiar with 'em. If
any of the church people come at you, you just send 'em
to me. I ain't afraid to speak out on occasion, and I
wouldn't mind one bit telling the Ladies' Aid a few things
about standard composers." Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and
added thoughtfully, "No, I wouldn't mind that one bit."
Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a
week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger
place than usual in her daughter's prayers; but that was
another thing she didn't mind.
Although revivals were merely a part of the year's work,
like examination week at school, and although Anna's
piety impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was
perplexed about religion. A scourge of typhoid broke out
in Moonstone and several of Thea's schoolmates died of
it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the
ground, and wondered a good deal about them. But a
certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic, troubled
her even more than the death of her friends.
Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a
particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone
in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in
the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from
the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking
under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with
rusty screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry
face covered with black hair. It was just before supper-
time when he came along, and the street smelled of fried
potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing
the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked
over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate,
for her mother never turned any one away, and this was
the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she
had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too.
She caught it even at that distance, and put her handker-
chief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she
knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled
a little faster.
A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped
in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside
the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show
there. He told the boys who went to see what he was doing,
that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained
a filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattle-
snakes.
Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to
get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an
accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There
she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in
the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the
sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--
and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in
and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him,
and he panted to the tune of "Marching through Georgia."
After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp ex-
hibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now
pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed
the sum of one dollar, he would eat "one of these living
reptiles." The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the
saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the
wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried
him away to the calaboose.
The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,--an old hut
with a barred window and a padlock on the door. The
tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him
a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants,
so after the constable had detained the tramp for twenty-
four hours, he released him and told him to "get out of
town, and get quick." The fellow's rattlesnakes had been
killed by the saloon keeper. He hid in a box car in the
freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next
station, but he was found and put out. After that he was
seen no more. He had disappeared and left no trace except
an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the
seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the
Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another
tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to
the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a
comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads
of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.
A week after the tramp excitement had passed over,
the city water began to smell and to taste. The Kron-
borgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city
water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors.
At first people said that the town well was full of rot-
ting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-
station convinced the mayor that the water left the well
untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being
eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the
standpipe--there was no other track for it to go in.
The standpipe amply rewarded investigation. The tramp
had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the
standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into
seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and
roll of ticking. The city council had a mild panic and
passed a new ordinance about tramps. But the fever had
already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen
children died of it.
Thea had always found everything that happened in
Moonstone exciting, disasters particularly so. It was grat-
ifying to read sensational Moonstone items in the Denver
paper. But she wished she had not chanced to see the
tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the
supper-laden air. His face remained unpleasantly clear in
her memory, and her mind struggled with the problem of
his behavior as if it were a hard page in arithmetic. Even
when she was practicing, the drama of the tramp kept
going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly
trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or
despair could drive a man to do such a hideous thing. She
kept seeing him in his bedraggled clown suit, the white
paint on his roughly shaven face, playing his accordion
before the saloon. She had noticed his lean body, his
high, ba...
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