They said that old Windpeter stood up on the seat of his wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened by his incessant slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death.  Boys like young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his foolish courage.  Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks 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 about Hal and muttered words.  “Tricked by Gad, that’s what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of,” he said in a low voice.