The Best Short Stories of 1921 | Page 5

is a little cracked," they say. He lives alone in
a little house buried deep in the forest and has a small dog he carries
always in his arms. On many mornings I have met him walking on the
road and he has told me of men and women who were his brothers and
sisters, his cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law. The notion has
possession of him. He cannot draw close to people near at hand so he

gets hold of a name out of a newspaper and his mind plays with it. One
morning he told me he was a cousin to the man named Cox who at the
time when I write is a candidate for the presidency. On another
morning he told me that Caruso the singer had married a woman who
was his sister-in-law. "She is my wife's sister," he said, holding the
little dog closely. His gray watery eyes looked appealingly up to me.
He wanted me to believe. "My wife was a sweet slim girl," he declared.
"We lived together in a big house and in the morning walked about arm
in arm. Now her sister has married Caruso the singer. He is of my
family now." As some one had told me the old man had never been
married I went away wondering.
One morning in early September I came upon him sitting under a tree
beside a path near his house. The dog barked at me and then ran and
crept into his arms. At that time the Chicago newspapers were filled
with the story of a millionaire who had got into trouble with his wife
because of an intimacy with an actress. The old man told me the actress
was his sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story
appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their childhood
together. "You would not realize it to see us now but we were poor
then," he said. "It's true. We lived in a little house on the side of a hill.
Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away.
How the wind blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong
houses for other people but our own house he did not build very
strongly." He shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got
into trouble. Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went
away along the path.
For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason
for the deed. The tale runs something like this--
The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman, and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was

employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to
the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a
heavy stolid-looking man with gray eyes, she seemed the most
beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of
the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the
shop, had a desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out
sheets containing the record of the work done by each man in his
department. When he looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at
her desk. The notion got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely.
He did not think of trying to draw close to her or of winning her love.
He looked at her as one might look at a star or across a country of low
hills in October when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold.
"She is a pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be
thinking about as she sits there by the window at work?"
In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his
apartment in Thirty-Second Street and into the presence of his wife and
his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home
he carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a
window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central
railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there
beside him. Down below women walked in the street and in every
woman he saw there