Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while a man likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful heiresses, coldblooded murderers and all that sort of tommyrot.
As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this—
The man’s name was Wilson,—Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something of the sort in the far west, as he had the peculiar abstract air, acquired only by being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories and so, after being with him for a time, one instinctively discarded the past.
“The devil—it doesn’t matter—the man can’t tell the truth in that direction.—Let it go,” one said to oneself. What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man’s wife.
As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time, I imagine, a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding sort of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can’t imagine the reasons—Let it go. It just is so and one can’t at all believe the writers of Western tales about the life out there.
To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of a small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an express company, and got arrested in connection with the disappearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl’s mother was already dead.
Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man and after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.
The woman, as I have said, had been strong and well-built but now grew thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well with a sort of air, as it were, and there was something about her that appealed strongly to men. Several men of the seedy little town were smitten by her and wrote her letters, trying to get her to creep out with them at night. You know how such things are done. The letters were unsigned. “You go to such and such a place on Friday evening. If you are willing to talk things over with me carry a book in your hand.”
Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the receipt of one of the letters and he grew angry and tramped off to the trysting place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no one appeared he came home and fussed about. He said little mean tentative things. “You must have looked—in a certain way—at the man when he passed you on the street. A man don’t grow so bold with a married woman unless an opening has been given him.”
The man talked and talked after that, and life in the house must have been gay. She grew habitually silent, and when she was silent the house was silent. They had no children.