Broken to the Plow A Novel

Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Fred Starratt remembered that he had been commissioned by his wife to bring home oyster cocktails for dinner. Of course, it went without say...

After the first two weeks Fred Starratt's business venture went forward amazingly. His application for membership in the Insurance Broker's Exchange was rushed through by influe...

It was noon before Helen Starratt finished her housework next morning--an unusually late hour for her, but she had been preoccupied, and her movements slow in consequence. A fou...

Next morning Fred Starratt knew that he was too ill to rise. Then everything became hazy. He had moments of consciousness when he sensed Storch's figure moving in a sort of mist...

Storch lighted his pipe and glowered. "The launching is to take place at noon. Hilmer has planned to arrive at the yards promptly at eleven forty-five at the north gate. Everyth...

It was extraordinary how wide awake Fred Starratt felt next morning. He was full of tingling reactions to the sharp chill of disillusionment. At the breakfast table he met his w...

Toward the middle of the following week Fred answered Ginger's letter. But his phrases were guarded and his description of life at the hospital full of studied distortion. He kn...

The next afternoon Fred Starratt took the fifty-cent piece that he had earned as flunky to his wife and spent every penny of it in a cheap barber shop on the Embarcadero. He eme...

The next morning Fred Starratt went down to the office alone. Mrs. Hilmer had telephoned the night before an invitation for Helen to join them in a motor trip down the Ocean Sho...

March passed in a blur of wind and cold, penetrating rains. Except for the placing of the insurance on the Hilmer shipbuilding plant, business was dull. Fred began to make moves...

The next day passed in complete inaction. Frankly, Starratt did not know what move to make. He felt that he should have been trying to square matters, but to raise offhand six h...

On a certain evening in February Fred Starratt, from the upper deck of a ferryboat, again saw the dusky outlines of San Francisco stretch themselves in faint allurement pricked...

He was sitting on a pile of lumber when, an hour later, his thoughts began to run in rational channels again. Before him lay a patch of gray-green bay, flanked on either side by...

Fred Starratt rested surprisingly well that first night. But two weeks in the detention hospital had taken the sting out of institutional preliminaries. The officials at Fairvie...

When Fred Starratt awoke a noonday sun was flooding in at the single window. Consciousness brought no confusion ... he was beginning to grow accustomed to sudden shifts in fortu...

The men at the booking desk treated Fred Starratt with a rough courtesy. They did not make the required search of his person unduly humiliating, and, when they were through, one...

When the Hilmers left, about half past eleven, Starratt went down to the curb with them, on the pretext of looking at Hilmer's new car. It proved to be a very late and very luxu...

The first week passed in an inferno of idleness. Fred Starratt grew to envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs. There once had been a time in his li...

Almost as soon as the phrase had escaped him he had a sense of its grotesqueness. Home! Yes, he had to admit that he felt a certain affection for that huddled room which had wit...

The days that followed passed in a blur. Fred Starratt went through the motions of living, but they were only motions. Between the intervals of legal adjustments, court examinat...

One morning, at the beginning of the second week of Fred Starratt's stay at Fairview, as he and Monet were swinging back to lunch after a brisk walk, they received orders to fal...

From this moment on Fred Starratt's existence had the elements of a sleepwalking dream. He felt himself going through motions which he was powerless to direct. Already Storch an...

Fred began to dress himself carefully. Storch loaned him an indifferent razor. The shaving process was slow but in the end it was accomplished. Fred was amazed at the freshness...

They kept Fred Starratt in bed for two weeks, and one morning when the sun was flooding through the skylight with soul-warming radiance they brought him his clothes and he knew...