“I—I forgot. I got off to look at a funny rock. See, papa!” His black eye sparkled as he took it from his shirt front and held it up eagerly.
His father did not look at it.
“Get on your horse!” he said harshly. “I can’t trust you to do anything. We’re late as it is, and women don’t like people coming in on ’em at meal-time without warning.” He kicked his horse in the ribs, and galloped off.
The abashed look in the boy’s face changed to sullenness. He jumped on his pony and followed his father, but shortly he lowered his black lashes, and the tears slipped down his cheeks.
Why had he shown that rock, anyhow? he asked himself in chagrin. He might have known that his father wouldn’t look at it, that he didn’t look at anything or care about anything but horses and cattle. Certainly his father did not care about him. He could not remember when the stern man had given him a pat on the head, or a good-night kiss. The thought of his father kissing anybody startled him. It seemed to him that his father seldom spoke to him except to reprimand or ridicule him, and the latter was by far the worse.
His eyes were still red when he sat down at the table, but the discovery that there was chicken helped assuage his injured feelings, and when the farmer’s wife deliberately speared the gizzard from the platter and laid it on his plate the world looked almost bright. How did she know that he liked gizzard, he wondered? The look of gratitude he shyly flashed her brought a smile to her tired face. There were mashed potatoes, too, and gravy, pickled peaches, and he thought he smelled a lemon pie. He wondered if they had these things all the time. If it wasn’t for his mother he believed he’d like to live with Mrs. Mosher, and golly! wasn’t he hungry! He hoped they wouldn’t stop to talk, so he’d dare begin.
He tried to regard his mother’s frequent admonitions concerning “manners”—that one about stirring up your potatoes as though you were mixing mortar, and biting into one big slab of bread. He did his best, but his cheek protruded with half a pickled peach when he heard his father say:
“I sent Bruce on ahead to tell you that we’d be here, but he didn’t mind me. I found him out there on the prairie, looking at a rock.”
All eyes turned smilingly upon the boy, and he reddened to the roots of his hair, while the half peach in his cheek felt suddenly like a whole one.
“It was a funny kind of rock,” he mumbled in self-defence when he could speak.