The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.  She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it.  One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house.  With the mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George Willard.  Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much anxiety.  She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith’s Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.  She did not think that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender and walked about under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her nature.  She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds.  About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith’s saloon.  His fists were large and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in Indiana.  When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six months.  Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe.  Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars.  One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing.  With his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted to nothing.  He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her company.  On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer’s livery barn and took her for a drive.  The conviction that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon him and he told her of his desires.  The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his intentions.  His body ached with physical longing and with his body he expressed himself.  Taking the milliner