As for her story—he did not tell it completely. I was myself much alive that evening—that is to say the imaginative side of myself was much alive—and the doctor was as a sower, sowing seed in a fertile soil. He was as one who goes through a wide long field, newly plowed by the hand of Death, the plowman, and as he went along he flung wide the seeds of May Edgley’s story, wide, far over the land, over the rich fertile land of a boy’s awakening imagination.
Chapter I
THERE were three boys and as many girls in the Edgley family of Bidwell, Ohio, and of the girls Lillian and Kate were known in a dozen towns along the railroad that ran between Cleveland and Toledo. The fame of Lillian, the eldest, went far. On the streets of the neighboring towns of Clyde, Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and even in Toledo and Cleveland, she was well known. On summer evenings she went up and down our main street wearing a huge hat with a white ostrich feather that fell down almost to her shoulder. She, like her sister Kate, who never succeeded in attaining to a position of prominence in the town’s life, was a blonde with cold staring blue eyes. On almost any Friday evening she might have been seen setting forth on some adventure, from which she did not return until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was evident the adventures were profitable, as the Edgley family were working folk and it is certain her brothers did not purchase for her the endless number of new dresses in which she arrayed herself.
It was a Friday evening in the summer and Lillian appeared on the upper main street of Bidwell. Two dozen men and boys loafed by the station platform, awaiting the arrival of the New York Central train, eastward bound. They stared at Lillian who stared back at them. In the west, from which direction the train was presently to come, the sun went down over young corn fields. A dusky golden splendor lit the skies and the loafers were awed into silence, hushed, both by the beauty of the evening and by the challenge in Lillian’s eyes.
Then the train arrived and the spell of silence was broken. The conductor and brakeman jumped to the station platform and waved their hands at Lillian and the engineer put his head out of the cab.
Aboard the train Lillian found a seat by herself and as soon as the train had started and the fares were collected the conductor came to sit with her. When the train arrived at the next town and the conductor was compelled to attend to his affairs, the brakeman came to lean over her seat. The men talked in undertones and occasionally the silence in the car was broken by outbursts of laughter. Other women from Bidwell, going to visit relatives in distant towns, were embarrassed. They turned their heads to look out at car windows and their cheeks grew red.
On the station platform at Bidwell, where darkness was settling down over the scene, the men and boys still lingered about speaking of Lillian and her adventures. “She can ride anywhere she pleases and never has to pay a cent of fare,” declared a tall bearded man who leaned against the station door. He was a buyer of pigs and cattle and was compelled to go to the Cleveland market once every week. The thought of Lillian, the light o’ love traveling free over the railroads filled his heart with envy and anger.
The entire Edgley family bore a shaky reputation in Bidwell but with the exception of May, the youngest of the girls, they were people who knew how to take care of themselves. For years Jake, the eldest of the boys, tended bar for Charley Shuter in a saloon in lower Main Street and then, to everyone’s surprise, he bought out the place. “Either Lillian gave him the money or he stole it from Charley,” the men said, but nevertheless, and throwing moral standards aside, they went into the bar to buy drinks. In Bidwell vice, while openly condemned, was in secret looked upon as a mark of virility in young manhood.
Frank and Will Edgley were teamsters and draymen like their father John and were hard working men. They owned their own teams and asked favors of no man and when they were not at work did not seek the society of others. Late on Saturday afternoons, when the week’s work was done and the horses cleaned, fed and bedded down for the night they dressed themselves in black suits, put on white collars and black derby hats and went into our main street to drink themselves drunk. By ten o’clock they had succeeded and went reeling homeward. When in the darkness under the maple trees on Vine or Walnut Streets they met a Bidwell citizen, also homeward bound, a row started. “Damn you, get out of our way. Get off the sidewalk,” Frank Edgley shouted and the two men rushed forward intent on a fight.