Slogum House by Mari Sandoz

Author:Mari Sandoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Finally Gulla stretched her bulk on the familiar comfort of her own bed, but only to wonder again about the Blackie of the crow’s nest Crazy as a shitepoke he was, but he didn’t look crazy enough to confess to the Bullard business just because some sky pilot yelled hell-fire. And if he had been bought off, she wondered who was paying, what the next move would be, and if she could prepare for it as handily as she got the stinking Bullard out of his pine box.

When Maxon stood up to be sentenced to ten years of hard labor as an accomplice to a murder he had looked over to the Slogums who were going scot-free. “I’ll get you yet—vengeance shall be the Lord’s!” he cried out over them, like a preacher scaring sinners. And as Tad Green hurried the prisoner away, the crowd behind him was up, benches upsetting, boot heels stomping wild as a herd of red-eyed longhorns at the smell of blood in a corral. The judge pounded them to silence and ordered the courtroom cleared, but he couldn’t stop the eyes, the whites brilliant in the wind-brown of the lean faces turning back to the Slogums as the settlers were shoved from the room to mill around the door outside, waiting.

With a ten-year sentence a man might be out in three or four, Lawyer Beasley told Hab before Gulla could drag her son away. She had to go back for Annette too, the girl stopping to ask about getting religion, as Maxon called it, from a sky pilot. She wanted to see the prisoner; she must know how to tell when you got religion.

“My girls are so soft-hearted—” Gulla scolded, wiping her own little eyes with her lace handkerchief. But she knew well enough that the girl was thinking of the walking preacher of the summer, and of the little Bible he kissed for her.

And as Gulla lay on her good feather bed without sleep she remembered the handbills they found in the whip sockets as they left Dumur, little pink handbills announcing:—

Sunday Evening

Sermon by Pastor Zug:

SATAN HOUSE

TEXT:

Violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness: none of them shall remain, nor of their multitude, nor of any of theirs: neither shall there be wailing for them….

EZEKIEL VII. 11

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