SOURCE: "The Case of Ross's Mysterious Barn," in Canadian Literature, No. 94, Autumn, 1982, pp. 168-69.

In the following essay, Whitman contends that the little girl in Ross's "One's a Heifer" is an imaginary construct of Vickers's "schizoid personality."

When discussing Sinclair Ross' "One's a Heifer," most readers seem drawn to essentially two considerations: why Vickers would not allow the boy to look into the stall and what he kept there. Over the years one popular explanation has emerged to the exclusion of others—namely, the boy was denied access to the stall because Vickers kept there the girl who used to visit him, and that she was possibly dead, but more probably confined as a prisoner. In my opinion this explanation is totally unsatisfactory, for the very good reason that the whole story of the girl is nothing more than a fiction in Vickers' mind. I see no grounds...