The Anderson farmhouse had once been a pleasant enough place when the whole family—Clarence, his mother and father, his older brother Walt, and his sisters Bessie and Emily—lived there; not over commodious perhaps and claiming no distinction of architecture or furnishings at all, but comfortable, more than adequate. Now the parents were dead, and so too was Walt: the sisters, who despised country living, had prudently married town men and taken themselves to live in Highboro.

Clarence, the sporty, jokey Anderson son, known to all as one ever ready to make a bet, share a jar of liquor, to play a game of cards, or chase a woman—although the latter pursuit had gained him naught but the occasional whore, who did not run very fast anyway—this Clarence, who had been surrounded by family, then in a space of eighteen months freed of its bonds by death and marriage, decided one morning early to kill himself, and did so. He was not sober when he did it, but he was rational. He had been alone and awake all the night, and before daylight, which he had vowed to himself not to see again, he loaded a pistol, turned it on himself, and blew his head all but off his neck.

The year 1837 was one of disquietude for the country. Money was short. Loans were called in. The Federal government had over-extended itself, particularly in the West. The wheat crop of 1836 was a failure, and the price of cotton had dropped to half of what it had been.

Clarence Anderson was not ruined by the Panic of 1837; he was destroyed first by his own fecklessness and finally by his own hand. Money short? He had only to mumble for friendly pocket and purse to open. It had seemed so simple, until he saw that he embarrassed old friends, which sent him to such men as Roscoe Elk, who could not embarrass him because he was so much above him. But came a time when Roscoe turned arrogant and hard to deal with, and notes were signed for past and current loans, long, detailed notes which he did not read then, drawn up and executed by a lawyer named Guthrie in Kitesville, a close-by largish town, so that there would be no gossip in Highboro to agitate his sisters.

Now, in the early spring of 1837, there was no money and no way to plant a crop, for which there would be no profit anyhow, because of low prices and what was already owed. The once-sporty, once-gay young man had nothing, and no one to turn to, and so he did what he could do, took the one action left to him. The gun, the cold predawn, the despair that was complete, not at all romantic or comical now as it once had seemed to him—combined to make an explosion and mark an ending.