litter on which, having crushed it by accident, she was now quite deliberately feasting.
“God Almighty!” stormed Martin, hastily putting the little pigs back into the next pen. “Who let them in to her? That’s her old trick.”
“I opened the door,” confessed Billy, troubled, frank eyes looking straight into his father’s. “They were hungry; that one wanted her most.” And, at the thought of the tragedy he had witnessed, he flung himself heartbroken into his mother’s comforting arms.
“I’ll whip you for this,” said Martin sternly.
“Oh, please!” protested Rose, gathering the child closer. “Can’t you see he’s had a bitter enough lesson? His little heart is full.”
“He’s got to learn, once and for all, not to meddle with the stock. Come here.”
“No! I won’t have it. I’ll see to it that he never does a thing like this again. He’s too young to understand. He’s never been struck in his life. You shan’t.”
Martin’s cold blue eyes looked icily into his wife’s blazing gray ones. “Don’t act like a fool. Suppose he had gotten in there himself, and had fallen down—do you think she’d have waited to kill him? Where’d he be now—like that?” and he pointed to the half-eaten carcass.
Rose shuddered. There it was again—the same, familiar, disarming plausibility of Martin’s, the old trick of making her seem to be the one in the wrong.
“I wish I had an acre for every good thrashing I got when I was a boy,” he commented drily. “But in those days a father who demanded obedience wasn’t considered a monster.”
“If you only loved him, I wouldn’t care,” sobbed Rose. “I could stand it better to have you hit him in anger, but you’re so hard, so cruel. You plan it all out so—how can you?”
Nevertheless, with a last convulsive hug and a broken “Mother can’t help it, darling,” she put Billy on his feet, her tormented heart wrung with bitterness as Martin took the clinging child from her and carried him away, hysterical and resisting.
“What else could I do?” she asked herself miserably, stabbed by the added fear that Billy might not forgive her. Could he understand how powerless she had been?
When once more the child was cuddled against her, she realized that in some mystical way there was a new bond between them, and as the days passed, she discovered it was not so much the whipping, but the unnatural perfidy of Dorcas that had scarred his mind. With his own eyes he had seen a mother devour her baby. He woke from dreams of it at night. Even the sight of her in the pasture contentedly suckling the remaining nine did not reassure him. The modern methods of psychology were then, to such women as Rose, a sealed book, but love and intuition taught her to apply them.
“You see, Billy,” she explained, “hogs are meant to eat meat like dogs or bears or tigers. But they can live on just grain and grass, and that is what most farmers make them do because there is so much more of it and it costs so much less. Some of them feed what is called tankage. If old Dorcas could have had some of that she probably would not have eaten the little pig. You mustn’t blame her too much, for she was just famishing for flesh, the way you are, sometimes, for a drink of water, when you’ve been playing hard.” Thus rationalized, the old sow’s conduct lost some of its gruesomeness, and in time, of course, the shock of the whole experience was submerged under other and newer impressions, but always the remembrance of it floated near the surface of his consciousness, his first outstanding memory of his father and the farm.
Inheriting a splendid physique from both parents, at six little Bill was as tall as the average child of eight, well set up and sturdy, afraid of nothing on the place except Martin, who, resenting his attitude, not unreasonably put the blame for it on his wife. “It’s not what I do to him,” he told her, “it’s what you teach him to think I might do that makes him dislike me.” To which Rose looked volumes, but made no reply.
Whatever the reason for the child’s distrust, and honestly as he tried not to let it affect his feeling for his son, Martin found himself as much repelled by it as he had once been drawn to little Rose by her sweet faith and affection. Yet, in spite of the only too slightly veiled enmity between them, he was rather proud of the handsome lad and determined to give him a thorough stockman’s and agriculturist’s training. Some day he would run this farm, and Martin had put too much of his very blood into it not to make sure that the hands into which it would fall became competent. With almost impersonal approval he noticed the perfect co-ordination of the boy’s muscles, his insatiable curiosity about machinery and his fondness for animals; all of which only made his pronounced distaste for work just that much more aggravating. He was, his father decided contemptuously, a dreamer.
Martin reached this conclusion early in his son’s life—Bill was nine—and he determined to grind the objectionable tendency out of him. The youngster had a way of stopping for no reason whatever and just standing there. For all his iron self-control, it nearly drove the energetic man to violence. He would leave Bill in the barn to shovel the manure into the litter-carrier—a good fifteen-minute job; he would return in half an hour to find him sitting in the alleyway, staring down into his idle scoop.
“God Almighty!” Martin would explode. “How many times must I tell you to do a thing?”
The boy would look up slowly, like a frightened colt, expecting a blow, his non-resistance as angering as his indolence. Gazing at the enormous, imposing person who was his father, he would simply wait with wide open eyes—eyes that reminded Martin of a calf begging for a bucket of milk.
“I’m asking you! Answer when I speak. Have you lost the use of your tongue? What are you, anyway—a lump of jelly? Didn’t I tell you to clean this barn? It’s fly time and no wonder the cows suffer and slack up on their milk when there is a lazy bones like you around who won’t even help haul away the manure.”
“I was just a-goin’ to.”
“You should have been through long ago. What are you good for, is what I’d like to find out. You eat a big bellyful and what do you give in return? Do you expect to go through the world like this—having other people do your work for you? If this job isn’t finished in fifteen minutes, I’ll whip you.”
Bill would work swiftly and painfully, for the carrier was high and hard for him to manipulate. But he would do his best, desperate over the threat, his whole nature rebelling, not so much at the task, as at the interruption of the pleasant stream of pictures which had been flowing so excitingly through his mind. Always it was like this—just when he was most blissfully happy, he was jerked back to some mean, dirty job by the stern, driving demands of his tireless father.
Without regard to the fact that harness is heavy, and a horse’s back high, Martin would order him to hitch up. He was perfectly aware that it was too much for the child, but lack of affection, and a vague, extenuating belief that especially trying jobs developed one, made him merciless. The boy frequently boiled with rage, but he was so weaponless, so completely in his father’s power—there was no escape from this tyranny. He knew he could not live without him; even his mother could not do that. His mother! What a sense of rest would come over him when he sat in her capacious lap, his head on her soft shoulder. With her cheek against his and her kind hand gently patting the back of his still chubby one, something hard in him always melted away.
“Why do I love you so, mama,” he asked once, “and hate papa so?”
Mrs. Wade realized what was in his sore heart and hers ached for him, but she answered quietly:
