When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o’clock and had begun to rain.  Three times he walked up and down the length of Main Street.  Sylvester West’s Drug Store was still open and he went in and bought a cigar.  When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was pleased.  For five minutes the two stood in the shelter of the store awning and talked.  George Willard felt satisfied.  He had wanted more than anything else to talk to some man.  Around a corner toward the New Willard House he went whistling softly.

On the sidewalk at the side of Winney’s Dry Goods Store where there was a high board fence covered with circus pictures, he stopped whistling and stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as though for a voice calling his name.  Then again he laughed nervously.  “She hasn’t got anything on me.  Nobody knows,” he muttered doggedly and went on his way.

GODLINESS

A Tale in Four Parts

There were always three or four old people sitting on the front porch of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm.  Three of the old people were women and sisters to Jesse.  They were a colorless, soft voiced lot.  Then there was a silent old man with thin white hair who was Jesse’s uncle.

The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outer-covering over a framework of logs.  It was in reality not one house but a cluster of houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner.  Inside, the place was full of surprises.  One went up steps from the living room into the dining room and there were always steps to be ascended or descended in passing from one room to another.  At meal times the place was like a beehive.  At one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open, feet clattered on stairs, a murmur of soft voices arose and people appeared from a dozen obscure corners.

Besides the old people, already mentioned, many others lived in the Bentley house.  There were four hired men, a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe, who was in charge of the housekeeping, a dull-witted girl named Eliza Stoughton, who made beds and helped with the milking, a boy who worked in the stables, and Jesse Bentley himself, the owner and overlord of it all.

By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that part of Northern Ohio where the Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from pioneer life.  Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain.  He had built modern barns and most of his land was drained with carefully laid the drain, but in order to understand the man we will have to go back to an earlier day.

The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for several generations before Jesse’s time.  They came from New York State and took up land when the country was new and land could be had at a low price.  For a long time they, in common with all the other Middle Western people, were very poor.  The land they had settled upon was heavily wooded and covered with fallen logs and underbrush.  After the long hard labor of clearing these away and cutting the timber, there were still the stumps to be reckoned with.  Plows run through the fields caught on hidden roots, stones lay all about, on the low places water gathered, and the young corn turned yellow, sickened and died.