The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to take his woman away.  He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists.  Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held him with one hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass.  Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet.  “You’re no good,” he said roughly.  “I’ve half a mind not to bother with you.  I’d let you alone if I didn’t want you so much.”

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think.  He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated him.  To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes.  The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but George Willard’s head struck the root of a tree and he lay still.  Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes.  As he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him.  He hated himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.  When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the voice outside himself that had so short a time before put new courage into his heart.  When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

“Queer”

From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr on the rear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle.  Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes.  They did not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off.  With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings.  Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg, standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and staring absentmindedly about.  “Well, well, what next!” exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the window.

A flush crept into Elmer Cowley’s face and his hands began to tremble.  In Cowley & Son’s store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the counter talking to his father.  He imagined the reporter could hear what was being said and the thought made him furious.  With one of the shoes still held in his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot upon the board floor.