e loved another man,
but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused
her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby,
bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with
the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.
She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender and
walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very
insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep
the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was
somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man
of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's
saloon. His fists were large and his eyes unusually
small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the
power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm
from an uncle in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought
in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six
months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an
orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward
filled his home town with awe. Here and there he went
throwing the money about, driving carriages through the
streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping
mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of
dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he
got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a
hotel and later went about smashing windows and
breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing
the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend
the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the
surface amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in
spending but one evening in her company. On that
evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's
livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction
that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he
must get her settled upon him and he told her of his
desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin
trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but
so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to
explain his intentions. His body ached with physical
longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking
the milliner into his