Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them.
For example there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day. The hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and Wilson and his woman were in their room.
Wilson's woman had been doing a family washing, and as it could not be dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room and had hung the clothes inside.
When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking outside in the rain, and going to the desk sat down and began to write.
He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the room, and in walking a wet garment brushed against his face.
He kept right on walking and talking to the woman, but as he walked and talked he gathered all the clothes in his arms and going to the little landing at the head of the stairs outside threw them down into the muddy yard below. He did that and the woman sat without moving or saying anything until he had gone back to his desk, then she went down the stairs, got the clothes and washed them again; and it was only after she had done that and when she was again hanging them in the room above that he appeared to know what he had done.
While the clothes were being rewashed he went for another walk and when she heard his footsteps on the stairs the hunchback girl ran to the keyhole. As she knelt there and as he came into the room she could look directly into his face. "He was like a puzzled child for a moment and then, although he said nothing, the tears began to run down his cheeks," she said. "That happened and then the woman, who was at the moment rehanging the clothes, turned and saw him. She had her arm filled with clothes, but dropped them on the floor and ran to him. She half knelt, the hunchback girl said, and putting her arms about his body and looking up into his face pleaded with him. "Don't. Don't be hurt. Believe me I know everything. Please don’t be hurt,” was what she said.
And now as to the story of the woman's death. It happened in the fall of that year.
In the place where she was sometimes employed, that is to say in the theatre, there was this other man, the little half-crazed stage-hand who shot her.
He had fallen in love with her and, like the men in the Kansas
