Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life

by Sherwood Anderson

The next step was taken. The German awoke in the house and began calling, and then he appeared at the kitchen door with a lantern in his hand. It was the lantern, his carrying of the lantern, that saved the situation for the wife and my friend. It made a little circle of light outside of which he could see nothing, but he kept calling his wife, whose name was Katherine, in a distracted frightened way. “Oh, Katherine. Where are you? Oh, Katherine,” he called.

My friend acted at once. Taking hold of the woman’s hand he ran—making no sound—along the shadows of the barn and across the open space between the barn and the fence. The two people were two dim shadows flitting along the dark wall of the barn, nothing more and at the place in the fence where there were no bushes he lifted her over and climbed over after her. Then he ran through the orchard and into the road before the house and putting his two hands on her shoulders shook her. As though understanding his wish, she answered her husband’s call and as the lantern came swinging down toward them my friend dodged back into the orchard.

The man and wife went toward the house, the German talking vigorously and the woman answering quietly, as she had always answered him. Tom was puzzled. Everything that happened to him that night puzzled him then and long afterward when he told me of it. Later he worked out a kind of explanation of it—as all men will do in such cases—but that is another story and the time to tell it is not now.

The point is that my friend had, at the moment, the feeling of having completely possessed the woman, and with that knowledge came also the knowledge that her husband would never possess her, could never by any chance possess her. A great tenderness swept over him and he had but one desire, to protect the woman, not to by any chance make the life she had yet to live any harder.

And so he ran quickly to the barn, secured the blanket and climbed silently up into the loft.

The farm hand with the drooping mustache was sleeping quietly on the hay and Tom lay down beside him and closed his eyes. As he expected the German came, almost at once, to the loft and flashed the lantern, not into the face of the older man but into Tom’s face. Then he went away and Tom lay awake smiling happily. He was young then and there was something proud and revengeful in him—in his attitude toward the German, at the moment. “Her husband knew, but at the same time did not know, that I had taken his woman from him,” he said to me when he told of the incident long afterward. “I don’t know why that made me so happy then, but it did. At the moment I thought I was happy only because we had both managed to escape, but now I know that wasn’t it.”

And it is quite sure my friend did have a sense of something. On the next morning when he went into the house the breakfast was on the table but the woman was not on hand to serve it. The food was on the table and the coffee on the stove and the three men ate in silence. And then Tom and the German stepped out of the house together, stepped, as by a prearranged plan into the barnyard. The German knew nothing—his wife had grown restless in the night and had got out of bed and walked out into the road and both the other men were asleep in the barn. He had never had any reason for suspecting her of anything at all and she was just the kind of woman he had wanted, never went trapsing off to town, didn’t spend a lot of money on clothes, was willing to do any kind of work, made no trouble. He wondered why he had taken such a sudden and violent dislike for his young employee.

Tom spoke first. “I think I’ll quit. I think I’d better be on my way,” he said. It was obvious his going, at just that time, would upset the plans the German had made for getting the work done at the rush time but he made no objection to Tom’s going and at once. Tom had arranged to work by the week and the German counted back to the Saturday before and tried to cheat a little. “I owe you for only one week, eh?” he said. One might as well get two days extra work out of the man without pay—if it were possible.

But Tom did not intend being defeated. “A week and four days,” he replied, purposely adding an extra day. “If you do not want to pay for the four days I’ll stay out the week.”

The German went into the house and got the money and Tom set off along the road.