The feet of the boy in
the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across
the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came
a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb
your hair, it's falling into your eyes," commanded the
voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little
hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though
arranging a mass of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a
ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in
any way a part of the life of the town where he had
lived for twenty years. Among all the people of
Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George
Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New
Willard House, he had formed something like a
friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the
Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked
out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's house. Now
as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his
hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George
Willard would come and spend the evening with him.
After the wagon containing the berry pickers had
passed, he went across the field through the tall
mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered
anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he
stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up
and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran
back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.
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