" On Sunday afternoons he crawled into the hayloft of one of the barns,
drank his weekly portion of whisky, got drunk, and sometimes did not appear
again until time to go to work on Monday morning. In the fall Jim took his
savings and went to spend a week at the grand circuit trotting meeting at
Cleveland, where he bought a costly present for his employer's daughter and
then bet the rest of his money on the races. When he was lucky he stayed on
in Cleveland, drinking and carousing until his winnings were gone.
It was Jim Priest who always led the attacks of teasing at the table, and
in the summer of her seventeenth year, when she was no longer in the mood
for such horse-play, it was Jim who brought the practice to an end. At the
table Jim leaned back in his chair, stroked his red bristly beard, now
rapidly graying, looked out of a window over Clara's head, and told a tale
concerning an attempt at suicide on the part of a young man in love with
Clara. He said the young man, a clerk in a Bidwell store, had taken a pair
of trousers from a shelf, tied one leg about his neck and the other to a
bracket in the wall. Then he jumped off a counter and had only been saved
from death because a town girl, passing the store, had seen him and had
rushed in and cut him down. "Now what do you think of that?" he cried. "He
was in love with our Clara, I tell you."
After the telling of the tale, Clara got up from the table and ran out of
the room.
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