Murder in Little Egypt Read Online Free

you ever let me catch you running away like that again,” Peck told Dale. “The next time that happens, you stand your ground, hear?”
    Peck let his son know about the time a couple of old boys from the Charlie Birger gang had tried to intimidate him. Peck had been standing on the Eldorado platform waiting for Noma to return from visiting relatives. These gangsters had ordered him to move on. They said they were clearing the platform for somebody important. Peck told them they could go to hell, there wasn’t anybody more important than his wife. One of them started to reach inside his coat for his pistol, but Peck decked him with a quick right cross. While the other one stood there like a dummy, stunned for a moment, Peck lit out, ran·home, and fetched his shotgun. When he made it back to the station, the gangsters were gone and Noma was waiting for him, wondering why he had shown up to meet her carrying his gun.
    “I wasn’t about to let some two-bit gangsters push me around,” Peck said, “and they knew it. You stand and fight or don’t bother coming home.”
    For the rest of his life Dale spoke of that moment as a turning point. The next day he faced his tormentors and fought. He found that he could fight like hell. He was a small boy but he used his feet as well as his fists and, when he had to, his teeth. The word got around that if you got into a scrap with Curly Cavaness, as he was called, you remembered it. He could pick his own opponents and found that he could take punishment without giving ground, could enuure pain, and that not giving up and not caring if you got hurt meant more than how big you were.
    The knickerbockers gave way to jeans. The violin was left behind. He kept up with his studies, but he began spending more time on sports, and Noma had to relent when her boy came home as dirty as the next kid.
    Dale had not really needed the knickers to know that he and his family were better off than most of the people in Eldorado. Throughout the Depression, six out of ten men were out of work and on relief in Little Egypt. Few could pay taxes, and running water was cut off in most towns by 1932. People dug wells in their yards and reverted to outdoor privies. Many lost their electricity and saw their houses fall apart for lack of paint and other maintenance.
    Southern Illinois depended on coal, and the mines shut down one after another. In 1925, twenty-five mines in Saline County had been operating; by 1939 the number was down to ten, some of these strip mines requiring few workers. In Eldorado—called one of Seven Stranded Coal Towns in a report by the Works Projects Administration—the typical family of four, taking into account all available forms of relief, averaged about forty dollars a month in income. Half of this went for food. People ate a lot of water gravy—bacon dripping, flour, salt, and water, poured over bread if they had it. When lodges and churches distributed surplus government food, people lined up for it, humiliated but starving. In the hot summers, if a family had a nickel to spare, they could make a twelve-and-a-half-pound block of precious ice, wrapped in rags and stowed under the house, last for three or four days, meaning the magic of iced tea and lemonade. A man might find a day’s work now and then in a mine, if he could get transportation to the job. He could pick peaches for a few days a year, getting paid mostly in fruit. He could collect scrap metal and coat hangers, make flower pots out of tin cans, or clean tombstones in an effort to create goods and services no one wanted or could afford.
    Through all these years Peck Cavaness was able to bring home his paycheck, and Noma kept house meticulously and could afford the materials to do so. Her hardwood floors shone; her pots and pans gleamed; no cobweb lasted through a day. It was a modest, white frame house, two bedrooms and a porch; but Peck and Noma cared for it religiously. Peck could repair just about anything, and