In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

high wheat plains of western Kansas,

Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border,

hard blue skies and desert...

local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The la...

a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefull...

At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which

many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.