Like one struggling for release
from hands that held him he struck out, hitting George
Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the
mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the
blows. Springing aboard the passing train and running
over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car
and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the
fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up in him. "I
showed him," he cried. "I guess I showed him. I ain't
so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't so queer."
THE UNTOLD LIE
Ray Pearson and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on
a farm three miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday
afternoons they came into town and wandered about
through the streets with other fellows from the
country.
Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty
with a brown beard and shoulders rounded by too much
and too hard labor. In his nature he was as unlike Hal
Winters as two men can be unlike.
Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little
sharp-featured wife who had also a sharp voice. The
two, with half a dozen thin-legged children, lived in a
tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end
of the Wills farm where Ray was employed.
Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow.
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