Before the War

THE GOODHUES OF SINKING CREEK-- W. R. Burnett--Harper ($1.50).

Though the College of Critics last week continued to look down its collective nose at Author William Riley Burnett, readers-at-large continued to lend him their ears. Accused on the one hand of "commercializing " the Hemingway manner and hailed on the other as a story-teller who does not set himself up to be anything fancier, Author Burnett never goes behind the facts of what he has to tell, but his facts are telling. The Goodhues of Sinking Creek is only a long short story, but its rapid narrative covers as much ground as many a full-length novel.

Before the Civil War in the border State of Ohio feeling ran high between the Abolitionists and the Southern sympathizers. The Goodhues, who had originally come from Kentucky, were Union men but bitterly against the Abolitionists. Pa Goodhue was one of the most respected men in the neighborhood but he would have been wiser to keep his political opinions to him self. The Bristowes were nobodies but they were on the right side of the fence, and they had a game-warden in the family. It all started with Clay Goodhue's arrest for snaring fish on his own father's property. That led to a suspended sentence and two fistfights. But when officers of the law came to free the family pet, Grandma Goodhue's caged red bird, shot guns were taken off the wall. The posse that had set out to hang Pa Goodhue lost its nerve, but that night somebody shot him in the dark. His murderer almost got away to the war scot-free; just in time Clay found out who it was, paid the family debt and went West where there was no war, no Abolitionists.

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