IV
A dour time followed when Mrs. Anna Forge heard that Nathan had been slated for a trip to the Far East.
She acclaimed in the highways and byways that the Thornes were sending her boy to his death, to be gnawed by wolves and lashed with knouts. She visited old Jim Thorne in his offices and told him what she thought of him. Nathan had to be called to take her away. The week before Nat left town she clawed his face when he tried to get her out of my house, whither she had come to invoke my intercession in stopping the mad enterprise.
“After all I’ve done for him, he goes off to the other side the world and leaves me! Casts me aside like an old shoe! He shan’t go! He shan’t! He shan’t!”
It developed that she was not half so much concerned for Nathan’s welfare, or what might possibly happen to him in the Orient, as she was for herself and how she was going to live in the meantime.
With Nathan’s wife eliminated at last, of course God had shown plainly enough that He wished the son to devote the rest of his days and dollars to his darling mother.
She went and saw a lawyer about it and when the lawyer was cool, she visited the editor of the local paper and wanted a “piece” inserted therein, flaying the lawyer alive and exposing him as a double-dealer, a horse thief, a wife beater and a villain of the deepest dye.
Nathan gave her a hundred dollars and a five-pound box of chocolate caramels—the kind with nuts in them—whereupon Mrs. Forge conceded that Siberia might have its good points and would he write to her every week and be sure to wear his heavy underwear in those awful Siberian winters?
Nathan promised and Mrs. Forge departed through the town to spend seventy-two of the hundred dollars before five o’clock on clothes for Edith’s youngsters. Not because Edith’s youngsters especially needed the clothes, but because Mrs. Forge had the hundred dollars.