rks and going on with their humdrum lives.

But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet
of his son Hal who worked on the Wills farm with Ray
Pearson. It is Ray's story. It will, however, be
necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you
will get into the spirit of it.

Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were
three of the Winters boys in that family, John, Hal,
and Edward, all broad-shouldered big fellows like old
Windpeter himself and all fighters and woman-chasers
and generally all-around bad ones.

Hal was the worst of the lot and always up to some
devilment. He once stole a load of boards from his
father's mill and sold them in Winesburg. With the
money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy
clothes. Then he got drunk and when his father came
raving into town to find him, they met and fought with
their fists on Main Street and were arrested and put
into jail together.

Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a
country school teacher out that way who had taken his
fancy. He was only twenty-two then but had already been
in two or three of what were spoken of in Winesburg as
"women scrapes." Everyone who heard of his infatuation
for the school teacher was sure it would turn out
badly. "He'll only get her into trouble, you'll see,"
was the word that went around.

And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a
field on a day in the late October. They were husking
corn and occasionally something was said and they
laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who was the more
sensitive and always minded things more, had chapped
hands and they hurt. He put them into his coat pockets
and looked away across the fields. He was in a sad,
distracted mood and was affected by the beauty of the
country. If you knew the Winesburg country in the fall
and how the low hills are all splashed with yellows and
reds you would understand his feeling. He began to
think of the time, long ago when he was a young fellow
living with his father, then a baker in Winesburg, and
how on such days he had wandered away into the woods to
gather nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about and
smoke his pipe. His marriage had come about through one
of his days of wandering. He had induced a girl who
waited on trade in his father's shop to go with him and
something had happened. He was thinking of that
afternoon and how it had affected his whole life when a
spirit of protest awoke in him. He had forgotten abou