When Linda got off the train from the honeymoon she still had on paint and powder and a pretty dress, but you wouldn’t have thought for a minute that she was pretty. She didn’t seem any too happy either, but she smiled at everyone and said she’d had a wonderful time.
Everybody noticed how kind and considerate Cass was when he helped Linda into the car. You’d of thought he was a prince or something helping the most beautiful lady in the world into a carriage all lined with silk.
And Cass kept on being kind and considerate. People invited to dinner couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw how gentle Cass was with Linda. He kissed her and loved her right before everybody and sometimes he went a little too far with it and shocked some of the ladies.
What puzzled people was the way Linda acted. She didn’t bother to use powder or paint any more. She didn’t wear pretty dresses, either. When Cass kissed her and loved her in front of people she tried to pull away at first. Then something’d happen to her and her lips’d part and she’d grab Cass’ arm and look at him kind of wild until she remembered where she was. Then she’d turn and run out of sight and everybody’d be embarrassed.
That went on for a long time: Cass being kind and considerate and loving Linda a little too much before people and Linda acting funny about it.
And then Cass hired Jim Carver as handy-man. Jim was from another county and he wasn’t much good as a farm worker. He was a scrawny, ferrety-looking guy, always grimy and ragged, and most of the time he was either half drunk on sweet wine or sick to his stomach from what he had drunk the night before. He was as shiftless as they come, and nobody liked him. He was just plain no-account, folks said, and the only kind of work he ever got was the hateful odd jobs nobody else would do.
Everybody said it made them feel uncomfortable just to be around him.
Jim didn’t live on the Buford farm. He came out from the village about three times a week and did what there was to do. At first he went back to his shack in the village soon’s work was over and got drunk. But then he started staying around the farm a little while longer in the evening before he went home, weeding Linda’s flower garden and bringing her shoots and things from other gardens.
At first people thought it was just because Linda was kind-hearted. Jim was different from most folks and so was Linda and it was natural they’d have something in common. People didn’t pay much attention to the thing at all.
Then a sort of rumor started going around. At first nobody paid any attention to it. Linda was smart enough to know what side her bread was buttered on, they said. She had enough sense not to take any chances ruining the best thing that’d ever happened to her. Besides it was silly. Jim was such a miserable fellow, what with being drunk or sick half the time and all, that he wouldn’t appeal even to Linda.
For a while Cass went along just as usual. Then he spoke to just a few of his closest friends and made them promise never to breathe a word of it around. If they did, he said, he’d beat their heads off for them. That’s the reason the thing didn’t spread as fast as such things usually do. When Cass said he’d beat someone’s head off he meant just that.
It wasn’t until Cass went to the preacher that things started to happen. He was in the parsonage a long time and when he came out those who saw him didn’t suspect that he’d had anything serious on his mind. Remembering it later, they said he’d had a kind of funny smile on his face.
The preacher told about his part later. He said he went to Linda and tried to get her to pray. She wanted to know why and the preacher told her. She acted like the preacher must be crazy. Then he told about the talk he’d had with Cass. Linda didn’t seem to believe him at first. He went on talking and scolding her and urging her to pray her sins away and promise to try and live down the ugly, black, slimy sin she’d committed. She just sat there like a hunk of stone and didn’t say anything. The preacher went on talking and suddenly Linda got up and ran out of the room crying. The preacher couldn’t find her, so he went home and talked to his wife about it.
It was the next morning they found Cass lying in the kitchen with his head split open by an axe. The axe was laying right beside him and the blood on it was beginning to dry. At first they thought it must have been a robbing tramp who did it and then Cass’ friends came out and told about what Cass had confided to them. The preacher told his story, too.
That put a different face on things. They started looking for Linda. They found her in Jim’s cabin washing a bloody dress. Jim tried to help her out, but the sheriff smashed his face in with one blow and called him all the filthy names he could think of while he lay on the floor with blood spouting between his fingers.
Linda was awfully ugly then. Her hair hadn’t been combed and she had on an old faded dress. She looked worse than before Cass married her. She wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t cry or she wouldn’t look afraid. She was just sullen.
Linda wouldn’t talk until they got her to the county jail.
Then she said: “I did it. I hit him with the axe.”
They asked her why and she wouldn’t answer. She just didn’t pay any attention to questions. It didn’t matter.
It was the most exciting thing that’d ever happened in Cameron County. Nobody talked about anything else. The more people talked the more excited they got. Everybody remembered what a fine, upstanding, kind and generous man Cass Buford was and all he’d done for Linda. And then she’d killed him out of lust for a no-good bum like Jim. She ought to be lynched, they said.
Somebody suggested that Jim ought to be lynched first and they went for him. But Jim had packed up and gone away. Nobody ever saw him again.
The crowd sort of cooled down while looking for Jim and they didn’t make any serious attempt to lynch Linda after that. It was decided that law and order would take its course and there’d be a county hanging in back of the jail just as soon as Linda was found guilty.
The trial attracted a lot of attention in the county and even the big city papers took it up. They said Linda was the Cinderella Girl who’d murdered her fairy prince.
Cameron people didn’t call her anything like Cinderella. They called her every low name they could think of. They hated her. When Doc Marston still insisted there was something behind the case other than a depraved woman’s lust, people just walked away from him. He was too old a man to beat up. They just put him down as cracked and let it go at that.
The trial was over in a hurry. The defense attorney couldn’t do much. Linda wouldn’t help him. She just sat there in the courtroom stony-faced and looking straight ahead. She wouldn’t even testify.
The county attorney made a longer speech than was necessary, seeing as Linda was practically convicted already. He told of what a loving husband Cass had been, how he’d demonstrated his love before all sorts of people. He spoke of the fine home Cass’d given Linda and how she’d had everything a woman can desire. And then she’d thrown it all away for the lustful love of a man decent people wouldn’t even speak to.
“And then,” he said, “when her husband found her out she deliberately murdered him so that she could carry on her affair with the other man.”
It took the jury five minutes to bring in a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree and when they led Linda out of the courtroom, the other women spat at her.
The gallows was rigged up in back of the county jail. The crowd began gathering before dawn and by sunrise every man, woman and child in Cameron County was packed into the square. The prisoners in the jail lined the windows to watch.
Just as the sun came up and the roosters started crowing and the early freight began whistling far off on the river bend, they led Linda out of the jail and up the stairs to the gallows. A rustle and a murmur ran through the crowd and then a woman started screaming. Not in fear or horror. She was screaming insults at Linda. Some of the others took it up, but the men looked at one another and at the women and then kept their eyes on Linda and didn’t say anything.