American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American -- Periodicals
Another page and here was great-grandfather himself, in middle age,
his picture--a faded daguerreotype--showing him in his Sunday best,
but plainly in no Sunday mood. "Looks like a pirate," was Annie's
comment. There was no picture of great-grandmother. "Probably he
killed her off too young, before she had time to get her picture
taken." And Annie's eyes darted blue fire at the supposed culprit. She
shook her brown little fist at him. "You started all this," she said
aloud. "You began it. If you'd had a wife who'd've stood up to you
you'd never got drunk and killed a man, and you wouldn't have left
your family a nasty old mad vein in the middle of their foreheads,
looking perfectly unChristian. I just wish I had you here, you old
scoundrel! I'll bet I'd tell you something that'd make your ears
smart."
She banged to the album and put it in its place.
"Well, not me!" said Annie. "Not me! I'm not going to be bullied and
scared to death by any man with a bad temper, and the very next time
Mister Wes flies off the handle and raises Cain I'm going to raise
Cain, two to his one. I won't be scared! I won't be a little gump and
take such actions off any man. We'll see!"
It is easy enough to be bold and resolute and threaten a picture. It
is easy enough to plot action either before or after the need for it
arises. But when it comes to raising Cain two to your husband's one,
and that husband has been a long and successful cultivator of that
particular crop--why, that is quite a different thing.
Besides, as it happened, Annie did not wholly lack sympathy for his
next outburst, which was directed toward a tramp, a bold dirty
creature who appeared one morning at the kitchen door and asked for
food.
"You two Janes all by your lonesome here?" he asked, stepping in.
Wes had come into the house for another shirt--he had split the one he
was wearing in a mighty bout with the grubbing hoe--and he entered the
kitchen from the inner door just in time to catch the words.
He leaped and struck in one movement, and it carried the tramp and
himself outside on the grass of the drying yard. The tramp was a burly
man, and after the surprise of the attack he attempted to fight. He
might as well have battled with a locomotive going full speed.
"What you doin' way up here, you lousy loafer?" demanded Wes between
blows. "Get to hell out of here before I kill you, like you deserve,
comin' into my house and scarin' women. I've a great mind to get my
gun and blow you full of holes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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