The Midland A MAGAZINE OF THE MIDDLE WEST VOL. VII AUGUST, 1921 NO. 8 The Outsider By FRANCES DORWIN DUGAN It was a maple sugar day in northern Indiana. The pale winter sunshine coming through the bare trees lighted the grey of the slick, wet places on the branches where the sap oozed out, and turned the swollen buds to candle-like points of red. The air was balmy, but with that spring sharpness indefinably connected with the smell of black earth thawing. To Ivan Kostiz plodding along the sticky mud of the road, the flat, rich land on either side was satisfyingly beautiful. The fields near the road were being plowed, and the long rolls of earth shaded from black to warm sepia, as the eye followed the path of the heavy-footed, steaming plow-horses. In the distance, where trees and underbrush marked the line of the wandering river, a purplish mist softened the nakedness of the branches. The smoky tints, the absence of sharp color or outline, the suggestion -even so early in the year-of boundless fertility, were strangely reminiscent of April fields in Bohemia. A dim gold haze hovered over a clump of early willows near the covered bridge going into the town. Ivan's eyes glowed; he quickened his heavy steps, while with the hand which he kept in the breast of his sheepskin coat, he fingered the lavender paycheck from the Beet Sugar Company. It was Saturday, and the little country town was seething with mud-bespattered vehicles. Hale and hearty Yankee farmers joked with one another. It seemed to Ivan that many pairs of shrewd, bluegray eyes, hard and twinkling as pond ice, met his as he walked up the street. With an imitation that was wholly unconscious, he fell into something resembling the loose-jointed walk of the others. The usually neat, tiled floor of the country bank was muddied by the tread of many heavy boots, and the air was reeking with the smells of none too clean human bodies, of garlic, and of tobacco. Ivan took his place in the double line of men, standing patiently, each with a lavender pay check ready to hand to the teller. The line moved slowly, for many were having foreign money orders made out, as well as receiving the silver and gold coins, which they preferred, in the snake-like leather pocket-books. Ivan was near the end of the linenot far from the cashier's little office. The door opened vigorously. Sam Miller surveyed the bank with disgust. "Good Lord, Johnny," he said to the cashier, who, standing on a chair, was laboring in vain to attach a contrivance labelled "Ozone Machine" to an electric cord. "What yuh got here? Noah just opened up the Ark?" he added, grinning broadly at his own wit. "Confounded thing!" said John Blair, coming down. "Never will work when we need it. Just Beet Sugar pay day, Sam. Some little gang, isn't it?" "Got about all the Hunkies this country'll stand, I guess. Those blame little yellow houses stuck around everywhere get my goat," said Miller, scowling. "No use to get so sore, Sam. You made plenty of money last year on beets, and you know very well you can't get any ordinary hired man to go after beets like these Hunkie fellows." "Dog's work. Any smart hired man 'ud have invented a machine to do it. These fellows live like dogs and spoil any good place for the rest of us. Phugh!" "You sure got a grouch, Sam. Come back in an hour and the place will be about cleared out," said Blair cheerfully. The conversation had been carried on with the perfect freedom one uses sometimes in talking before young children; or the double line of men might well have been so many tiles in the floor for all the difference it made to the two men. Ivan's face, however, grew dully red, and several others in the line looked back with whipped-dog eyes. In front of the teller's window, however, a compact, energetic man, rather different from the others, fairly glared at Blair and Miller. "Serge Petchoff!" the teller repeated three times before the man in front of the window turned his gleaming eyes away from the cashier and Sam Miller to the business at hand. A jerky, angry fire seemed to burn in this man's tense body as he walked out. The rest of the line, passive, shuffled slowly forward. "Kostiz-K-o-s-t-i-z- Ivan," said the teller. "Put your mark here; get two people to witness it," he continued in a slow loud monotone. "I write," said Ivan putting his name with an indelible pencil on the line for that purpose. "How'd yuh want it?" asked the teller, shrugging his shoulders. It was all a part of the annoying Saturday's work - no more, no less. "A money order for t'irty dollar," said Ivan slowly and painstakingly. "Like oder two you sent -to Anna Kostiz." The teller got out the official blanks and rapidly filled in the answers to the questions. John Blair, stepping into the cage for a note-file, looked over the teller's shoulder and then up at Ivan. "None too sure about that's going over yet, Frank," he said to the teller. Things are pretty stirred up in that part of the world," he looked at Ivan again. “Wife?" he asked. "Mother," said Ivan eagerly. "She sick. She can come here when she get well. My wife — she here," he finished proudly. John Blair frowned a little. He had formed certain neat generalizations about Hunkies, but he was naturally full of sympathetic curiosity, and he re |