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 ar-
rested 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 spo-
ken of in Winesburg as "women scrapes." Everyone
who heard of his infatuation for the school teacher
was sure it would turn out badly.
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