CHAPTER III
THE GIRL AT THE CRESCENT
AN even greater ogre to the Cole boys than Silvanus Madmallet was their father, John Cole, traveling salesman for a wholesale hardware firm. Their mother, who had been Blanche Florence before her marriage, came of an old and respected family that had come over with Lord Calvert when Maryland was settled. She had married Cole against the family’s wish, and had been paying dearly ever since.
For John Cole was a self-centered brute, a hard master, a spendthrift. The boys did not know—though the mother did—that Cole fancied fast horses and fast women. He was a heavy drinker, but never a sot, for he carried his liquor well. In fact, but for the gloomy, suppressed rage in which it kept him almost constantly, few would have known that he was a steady drinking man.
While he tolerated his son Lester as a necessary nuisance, it seemed at times that he all but hated his older boy. He could not understand Joshua, with his constant, fearless, gray-blue eyes, and the boy’s gravity jarred upon him. And, as in the case of Madmallet, the fact that he could not break the lad’s spirit with the brutal punishment that he inflicted piqued his pride and made him merciless.
He labored under the delusion that Joshua was a “bad boy.” Silvanus Madmallet had told him so, for one thing. Joshua did not progress in the studies prescribed for him, and persisted in reading books which no child should be allowed to read. John Cole did not understand these books himself; they aroused no interest in his unimaginative mind. They were heretic, and while John Cole himself was anything but a firm believer in the Word of God, it was proper that his sons should be. He had taken from Joshua Steele’s Chemistry, Darwin’s Origin of Man and his Descent of Man, and Huxley’s Man’s Place In Nature. He himself had tried to read these books to find out, if possible, what it was all about. And it had proved not possible for him to find out what it was all about. When questioned closely, after Joshua’s head had been submerged in a bathtub full of water until he fell gasping on the floor when released, the boy confessed that he understood but little of what he was reading, but that it interested him nevertheless.
Thrusting his sons’ heads under water until they were all but drowned was John Cole’s own diabolical invention as a form of punishment, and though Lester escaped the terrible ordeal except for what were considered serious offenses, it was meted out to Joshua upon the slightest provocation. For Joshua was “bad,” and it was suspected that what sinfulness was Lester’s was the result of the influence exerted over him by his older brother. The boys’ mother was helpless to prevent these outrages, for he was unshaken by her tears; and threatening to leave her husband only brought forth the lofty invitation: “Go any time you feel like it, Blanche.” And she knew that John Cole meant it. He cared nothing for her. He had squandered her fortune, and continued to live with her, perhaps, only in the vague hope that some wealthy relative of hers might die and leave her more money, which would be easy loot for him again. Despite his constant drinking and his shady affairs with women, Cole was well thought of by his employers. For he was a different man when dealing with them and when calling upon the trade, and, above all, he was a marvelous “money-getter.” But the mother and her boys thanked heaven more than once that his business activities necessarily kept him away from home the greater portion of the time.
No small wonder, then, that Joshua and Lester, as they lazed in the vacant lot and awaited the coming of Slinky Dawson with the note to their parents, planned to stop that note midway in its journey. Slinky Dawson’s route home carried him directly past the Cole house, and the boys had every reason to believe that he would bear the note that day at noon. Their father was away selling goods, but that fact offered no consolation. Joshua had been expelled and Lester suspended for a week, and there was no possibility of their keeping the dread news from their father when he returned.
Lester continued his whining as the hours dragged on, but Joshua lay on his back on the moist earth, to the vast delight of the Cold-and-Croup Demon, and looked up at the blue spring sky. Joshua was forever looking up at the sky when not engaged in disturbing the daily routine of slugs or tumblebugs or spiders.
“Josh, what are we gonta do?” came the oft-repeated wail from Lester.
“Goin’ West,” said Joshua, linking his fingers behind his head and continuing his gazing into the heavens.