There was a man in town--Hog Hawkins. People called him the name right
to his face. He had given the Moorehead boys a lot of trouble.
The morning Cleveland papers were two cents each but if you had your
paper delivered to your house or to a store you got it for ten cents
the six days. Sunday papers were special and sold for five cents.
People, at their houses, usually took the evening papers, but the
stores, a few lawyers and others, wanted the morning paper. The morning
paper came in at eight o’clock, just time to run around with the papers
and make it to school. Lots of people came down to the train to get
their paper.
Hog Hawkins always did. He had to have a paper because he dealt in
hogs, buying them from farmers and shipping to the city markets. He had
to know the city market prices.
When John was selling papers Hog Howkins got to owing him--at one time
forty cents--and he said he had paid it when he hadn’t. There was a
quarrel and he wrote to the office of the paper in the city and tried
to have John’s agency taken away. In the letter he said John was
dishonest and impertinent.
It caused a lot of trouble. John had to get Lawyer King and three or
four merchants to write saying he was O. K. It isn’t a very nice thing
to have to ask. John hated it.
Then John wanted to get even with Hog Hawkins and did. The man might
have saved two cents a week by being all right--and every one knew that
two cents means a lot to such a man--but John made him pay up cash
every day. If he had paid by the week in advance, John would have made
it apply on the old debt. Hog Hawkins would never have trusted him with
the ten cents. He knew better than that.
At first Hog tried to get out of buying any paper at all. They took it
at the barber shop and at the hotel and it was lying around and he went
into one of the two places and sat looking at it for a few mornings,
but that couldn’t last. The old hog buyer had a little dirty white
beard he never had trimmed, and he was bald.
No money in such a man for a barber. In the barber shop they began
hiding the paper when they saw him coming and the clerk at the hotel
did the same thing. No one wanted him around. He smelled something
awful.
When John Moorehead got his dander up you couldn’t move him any more
than a brick wall. He did not say much but he could stand pat. If Hog
Hawkins wanted a paper he had to trot down to the station with the two
cents in his hand. If he was across the street and shouted John did
not pay any attention. People had to smile when they saw it. The old
man always reached for the paper before he gave John the two cents,
but John put the paper behind his back. Sometimes they just stood like
that, glaring at each other, and then the old man caved in. When it
happened at the station, the baggage man, the express agent and the
railroad crew all laughed. They used to whisper to John when Hog had
his back turned. “Don’t you give in,” they said. Little chance of that.
It wasn’t long before every one had it in for Hog. He had cheated a
lot of people and was so stingy he hardly ever spent a cent. He lived
alone in a small brick house on a street back of the cemetery and
almost always had pigs turned loose in the yard. In hot weather you
could smell the place a half mile. People tried to have him arrested
for keeping the place so dirty but he got out of it some way. If they
made a law no one could keep pigs in town it shut out a lot of other
people from keeping pretty clean pigs and they didn’t want that. A hog
can be kept clean the same as a dog or a cat but such a man would never
keep anything clean. He had been married to a farmer’s daughter when he
was young but she never had any children and died after three or four
years. Some people said that when his wife was alive he wasn’t so bad.
When Tar began to sell the papers the feud between Hog Hawkins and the
Mooreheads kept up.
Tar wasn’t as foxy as John. He let Hog get into him for ten cents right
off and that gave the old man a lot of satisfaction. It was a victory.
John’s method had always been never to say a word. He stood with the
paper held behind his back and waited. “No cash, no paper.” That was
his line.
Tar tried scolding, trying to get his ten cents back, and that gave the
old man a chance to laugh. In John’s day the laugh had been on the
other side of the fence.
* * * * *
Then something happened. Spring came and there was a long rainy time.
One night a bridge got washed out east of town and the morning train
did not come. At the station it was marked, first three hours late and
then five. The afternoon train was due at four-thirty and on a late
March afternoon in Ohio, when it is raining and the clouds hang low, it
is pretty near dark by five.
Tar went down to see about the trains at six and then went home to
supper. He went again at seven and at nine. No trains all day. The
telegraph operator told him he had better go home and forget it and he
did go home thinking he would go to bed, but Margaret got on her ear.
What was the matter with her Tar didn’t know. She didn’t usually act
as she did that night. John had come home from work tired and had gone
to bed. Mary Moorehead, pale and sick-looking, went to bed early. It
wasn’t very cold but the rain fell steadily and it was dark as pitch
outside. Maybe the calendar said it should have been a moonlight
night. The electric lights were turned off all over town.
It wasn’t that Margaret was trying to tell Tar what he should do about
his job. She was just nervous and excited, without any reason, and said
she knew that if she went to bed she couldn’t sleep. Girls get that
way sometimes. It might have been the spring coming on. “Ah, let’s sit
up until a train does come and then let’s take the papers around,” she
kept saying. They were in the kitchen and the mother must have gone
to sleep in her room. She never said a word. Margaret put on John’s
raincoat and his rubber boots. Tar had on a poncho. He could put his
papers under it and keep them pretty dry.
They went to the station that night at ten and again at eleven. There
wasn’t a soul on Main Street. Even the night watchman had hid himself
away. It was a night when even a thief wouldn’t be out. The telegraph
operator had to stay, but he had a grouch. After Tar asked him about
the train three or four times he wouldn’t answer. Well, he wanted to be
at home in bed. Every one did but Margaret. She had infected Tar with
her nervousness.
When they went to the station at eleven they decided to stay. “If we
go home again like as not we’ll wake mother up,” Margaret said. In the
station there was a fat country woman sitting on a bench asleep with
her mouth open. They had left a light burning but it was pretty dim.
A woman like that would be going to see her daughter in another town,
a daughter who was sick or going to have a baby or something. Country
people don’t travel much. When they make up their minds they’ll stand
anything. Start them and you can’t stop them. There was a woman in
Tar’s town went clear out to Kansas to see her daughter and she took
along all her own food and sat up in the day coach all the way. Tar
heard her tell about it once in a store when she got back home.
The train got in at half-past one. The baggage master and the ticket
man had gone home and the telegraph operator did their work. He had to
stay up anyway. He thought Tar and his sister had gone crazy. “Hey, you
crazy kids. What does any one in the world care whether or not they get
a paper this time a night? You ought to be spanked and sent off to bed,
the both of you.” The telegraph operator had a grouch, that night.
Margaret was all right and so was Tar. Now that he had got into it Tar
enjoyed staying up as much as his sister. On a night like that you are
sleepy and sleepy, so you think you can’t stand it another minute, and
then suddenly you aren’t sleepy at all. It’s like getting your second
wind when you are running a race.
A town at night, away after midnight and when it’s raining, is
different than a town in the day or in the early evening, when it’s
dark but the people in the houses are all awake. When Tar went around
with his papers on ordinary evenings he had a lot of short cuts he
always took. Well, he knew where they had dogs, knew how to save a lot
of ground. He went through alleyways, climbed fences. Most people did
not care. When a boy went around that way he saw a lot of things going
on. Tar had seen other things besides that time when he saw Win Connell
and his new wife cutting up.
That night, with Margaret along, he wondered whether he would go his
regular way or keep to the sidewalks. As though sensing what was going
on in his mind Margaret wanted to go the shortest and darkest way.
It was fun, puddling about in the rain and darkness, going up to dark
houses, slipping the paper under a door or back of a blind. Old Mrs.
Stevens lived alone and was afraid of disease. She had some money and
had another old woman working for her. She was always afraid of taking
cold and when it was winter or cold weather she paid Tar five cents
extra a week and he took the paper in the kitchen and held it over the
kitchen stove. When it was warm and dry the old woman who worked in
the kitchen ran with it into the front room. There was a box on the
front door of the house to keep the paper dry in wet weather. Tar told
Margaret about it and she laughed.
All kinds of people in town, having all kinds of notions, and now they
were all asleep. When they came to a house Margaret stood outside while
Tar crept up and put the paper in the dryest place he could find. He
knew most of the dogs, and anyway, that night the ugly ones were inside
out of the rain.
Every one inside, out of the rain, but Tar and Margaret. All asleep,
cuddled up in beds. If you let yourself go you could imagine just how
they looked. When Tar was going around alone he often spent his time
trying to imagine what was going on in houses. He could pretend the
houses had no walls. It was a good way to put in the time.
Walls of houses could not hide things from him more than a dark night
like that. When Tar came back from taking a paper into a house and when
Margaret was waiting outside he could not see her. Sometimes she hid
behind a tree. He called to her in a loud whisper. Then she came out
and they laughed.
They came to a shortcut that Tar hardly ever took at night--except when
it was warm and clear. It was right through the cemetery, not on the
Farley-Thompson side, but the other way. You got over a fence and went
between the graves. Then you crawled over another fence and through an
orchard and you were out in another street.
Tar told Margaret about the cemetery shortcut just to tease her. She
had been so bold, had wanted to do everything. He just thought he would
try her out and was surprised and a little upset when she took him up.
“Oh, come on. Let’s do it,” she said. After that there wasn’t anything
else Tar could do.
They found the place and got over the fence and there they were, right
in among the graves. They kept stumbling over stones but they did not
laugh now. Margaret was sorry she had been so bold. She crept close to
Tar and took hold of his hand. It had got darker and darker. They could
not see even the white gravestones.
That was where it happened. Hog Hawkins lived out that way. His hog
yard backed right up against the orchard they had to cross after they
got out of the cemetery.
They had got almost through and Tar was going ahead, hanging onto
Margaret’s hand and trying to find his way, when they almost fell over
Hog kneeling over a grave.
They didn’t know who it was, not at first. When they were almost on
top of him he groaned and they stopped. At first they thought it was a
ghost. Why they didn’t both cut and run they never knew. They were too
scared.
They both stood trembling and clinging to each other and there came
a stroke of lightning and Tar saw who it was. It was the only stroke
of lightning that night and after it passed there wasn’t hardly any
thunder at all, just a low rumbling sound.
A low rumbling sound far off in the darkness somewhere and a groan from
the man kneeling by the grave, almost at Tar’s feet. The old hog buyer
had been unable to sleep that night and had come out to the graveyard,
to his wife’s grave--to pray. Perhaps he did it every night when he
could not sleep. That might have been the reason he lived in a house so
near the graveyard.
A man like that, never having liked but one person, never having been
liked by but one person. They had married and then she had died.
Nothing after that but lonesomeness. He had got so he hated people and
wanted to die. Well, he was pretty sure his wife had gone to Heaven. He
wanted to get in there if he could. If she was in Heaven she might say
a word for him. He was pretty sure she would.
Suppose he died some night in his house, not a living thing about but
some hogs. In the town there was a story. Every one told it. A farmer
came to town looking for the hog buyer. He met Charlie Durlam, the
postmaster, who pointed out the house. “You will find him down there.
You can tell him from the hogs because he wears a hat.”
The graveyard had become the hog buyer’s church to which he went
at night. To belong to a regular church would imply some kind of
understanding with other people. He would have to give money now and
then. It cost nothing to go at night into a graveyard.
Tar and Margaret went softly out of the presence of the kneeling man.
After the one flash of lightning it was black dark but Tar managed to
find the way to the fence and got Margaret over and into the orchard.
Soon they were out on another street, both shaken and afraid. From the
street they could hear the moaning voice of the hog buyer coming out of
the darkness.
They hurried over the rest of Tar’s route, keeping to the streets
and sidewalks. Now Margaret wasn’t so frisky. When they got to the
Moorehead house she tried to light a lamp in the kitchen and her hand
trembled. Tar had to take the match and do the job. Margaret was pale.
Tar might have laughed at her but wasn’t so sure how he looked himself.
When they had gone upstairs and to bed Tar was awake for a long time.
It was good to get into bed with John, who had the bed all warm and who
never woke up.
Tar had made up his mind to something but thought it just as well
not to tell John. The battle the Mooreheads had been having with Hog
Hawkins was John’s battle, not his. He was out ten cents but what is
ten cents?
He did not want the baggage man to know, did not want the express man
or any of the people who habitually hung around the railroad station
when the train came in to know that he had surrendered.
He had made up his mind to have it out with Hog Hawkins the very next
day, and did. He waited until there wasn’t any one looking and then
went to where the man stood waiting.
Tar thrust out the paper and Hog Hawkins grabbed it. He made a bluff
at fishing in his pockets for the pennies but of course he didn’t find
any. He wasn’t going to miss a chance like that. “Well, well, I forgot
the change. You’ll have to wait.” When he said it he chuckled. He was
sorry none of the men around the station had seen what had happened,
how he had caught one of the Moorehead boys off guard.
Well, a victory was a victory. He went off along the street clutching
the paper and chuckling. Tar stood watching.
If Tar lost two cents a day three or four times a week it wouldn’t
amount to much. Now and then some traveling man got off a train and
gave him a nickel, saying, “Keep the change.” Two cents a day wasn’t so
much. Tar thought he could stand it. He thought of Hog Hawkins getting
his little moments of satisfaction, beating him out of papers, and made
up his mind he would let him.
He would, he thought, when there weren’t too many people about.