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JANUARY 1924
BAD HAN
BY GLENWAY WESCOTT
THE VIOLENT NIGHT
tHE sun settled into the tawny marshes. Lean cattle with large bony heads came down the lane to struggle around the water-trough. Summer was falling from the thin trees.
Hannah Madoc stirred the fire. For two hours she had waited for her father to return from an election at Bieler. Supper was ready to set on the table. She sat by the window, hungry and resentful, preoccupied with the marshes, a broken dominating brightness. The snarled grass mile after mile piled by the wind, the thick sunlight in cups of white water, the herds of waterfowl in insubstantial letters on the sky.
Beyond the yard the clay covered with burdocks and knot-grass fell away abruptly into bogs which disappeared in their turn in swales of harsh vegetation. A river crawled in loops and spirals through the valley, the bed of an ancient lake, twisting in tamarack swamps to the black, diminished water. From Hannah's window all this appeared as a spotted expanse, fecund but useless, a lure for the listless eye, bounded by stringy elms, by striped tamaracks—a tangled mass of livid twigs, curious leaves, flowers, and berries, their outlines lost in profusion.
She drank a cup of black coffee, filled the tea-kettle, and sat down again. The sun crept among some trees. One by one with throaty cries the crows flew into the woods, their square notched wings like ragged sails.
She stood sullenly in the open door peering into the yellow twi-
