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Page 69
Grandmother found me there in the morning. Her cry of fright awakened me.
Truly, I was a battered object. As she helped me to my room, I caught a
glimpse of myself in the mirror. My lip was cut and stood out like a
snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut
and hideously discoloured. Grandmother said we must have the doctor at
once, but I implored her, as I had never begged for anything before, not to
send for him. I could stand anything, I told her, so long as nobody saw me
or knew what had happened to me. I entreated her not to let grandfather,
even, come into my room. She seemed to understand, though I was too faint
and miserable to go into explanations. When she took off my night-shirt,
she found such bruises on my chest and shoulders that she began to cry.
She spent the whole morning bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me with
arnica. I heard Antonia sobbing outside my door, but I asked grandmother
to send her away. I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated
her almost as much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this
disgustingness. Grandmother kept saying how thankful we ought to be that I
had been there instead of Antonia. But I lay with my disfigured face to
the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that
grandmother should keep everyone away from me. If the story once got
abroad, I would never hear the last of it. I could well imagine what the
old men down at the drugstore would do with such a theme.
While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable, grandfather went to
the depot and learned that Wick Cutter had come home on the night express
from the east, and had left again on the six o'clock train for Denver that
morning. The agent said his face was striped with court-plaster, and he
carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so used up, that the agent
asked him what had happened to him since ten o'clock the night before;
whereat Cutter began to swear at him and said he would have him discharged
for incivility.
That afternoon, while I was asleep, Antonia took grandmother with her, and
went over to the Cutters' to pack her trunk. They found the place locked
up, and they had to break the window to get into Antonia's bedroom. There
everything was in shocking disorder. Her clothes had been taken out of her
closet, thrown into the middle of the room, and trampled and torn. My own
garments had been treated so badly that I never saw them again; grandmother
burned them in the Cutters' kitchen range.
While Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to leave
it, the front doorbell rang violently. There stood Mrs. Cutter-- locked
out, for she had no key to the new lock--her head trembling with rage. `I
advised her to control herself, or she would have a stroke,' grandmother
said afterward.
Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlour while she related to her just what had occurred the night
before. Antonia was frightened, and was going home to stay for a while,
she told Mrs. Cutter; it would be useless to interrogate the girl, for she
knew nothing of what had happened.
Then Mrs. Cutter told her story. She and her husband had started home from
Omaha together the morning before. They had to stop over several hours at
Waymore Junction to catch the Black Hawk train. During the wait, Cutter
left her at the depot and went to the Waymore bank to attend to some
business. When he returned, he told her that he would have to stay
overnight there, but she could go on home. He bought her ticket and put
her on the train. She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill into her handbag
with her ticket. That bill, she said, should have aroused her suspicions
at once--but did not.
The trains are never called at little junction towns; everybody knows when
they come in. Mr. Cutter showed his wife's ticket to the conductor, and
settled her in her seat before the train moved off. It was not until
nearly nightfall that she discovered she was on the express bound for
Kansas City, that her ticket was made out to that point, and that Cutter
must have planned it so. The conductor told her the Black Hawk train was
due at Waymore twelve minutes after the Kansas City train left. She saw at
once that her husband had played this trick in order to get back to Black
Hawk without her. She had no choice but to go on to Kansas City and take
the first fast train for home.
Cutter could have got home a day earlier than his wife by any one of a
dozen simpler devices; he could have left her in the Omaha hotel, and said
he was going on to Chicago for a few days. But apparently it was part of
his fun to outrage her feelings as much as possible.
`Mr. Cutter will pay for this, Mrs. Burden. He will pay!' Mrs. Cutter
avouched, nodding her horse-like head and rolling her eyes.
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