He swung up the heavy tool, but the boy dived with amazing dexterity, and then ran backwards. Again and again the father aimed blows that would have murdered him, but always missed. Then the growing crowd that had gathered flung themselves in between the two and held the infuriated man shouting in their arms. The father's hysteria mounted higher and higher: the pent-up wrong of ten years ago surged out from his mouth.
"Son of a harlot, come here, that I may slay you," he shrieked at last, wrestling like a maniac. At that the boy turned to a deathly hue,—under his bronzed face.
"Enough," he cried thickly, "I came here from afar with you and now I go again. Never shall I return."
He turned with a clumsy dramatic gesture; looked round once to see that he was not followed, and then running quickly towards the city gate was lost in the throng.
The crowd released the father. All talked volubly all the time. This was a business which must be amicably settled. But the father never answered. He made a hesitating step or two like a drunken man, then reeled to the door of his hut which he opened and slammed behind him.
The wondering crowd, consumed with curiosity, only slowly dispersed. This outbreak was of the stuff that made up their daily lives. It was in the air, always lurking half-hidden behind the blue-cotton exterior of their monotonous existence, coming in sudden storms. Swift, well-recognized and very often fatal to the weak, but nevertheless accepted as something which comes directly from Heaven.
CHAPTER VIII
For many days no one in the neighbourhood saw or heard of the boy; he had disappeared as utterly as if the ground had swallowed him up. The neighbourhood gossiped about the incident as they loitered about in the evening watching the father sitting motionless and silent at his door. And in the Eastern way the tale grew until it was averred that the father had tried to slay his son with his huge smith's hammer and that he was grimly waiting for the truant's return to carry out his threat. It was said that the boy had fled back to the village whence he had originally come years before in that inconsequential way on a creaking wheelbarrow, and that never would he be seen again.
"Perhaps he has killed himself," suggested the women, always willing to believe the worst. But the men shook their heads, firm in the belief that in this case flight to the ancestral village had been sufficient redress.