My mother sort of threw out her hand.
“Don't!” she said. “It is enough without that. It is enough to be a bully without being a liar. Mrs. Martin has told me—”
“I ain't a liar!” I said, because I was so mad I could have cried. “If she said that, she's a liar; that's what she is!”
Well, I oughtn't to have called a lady that, or anybody, but I was so mad I didn't think. I wasn't thinking about how I said it, and when a fellow's mother looks at him the way my mother was looking at me, and won't believe him when he's telling the truth, what's he going to do? I guess my mother was feeling pretty bad herself or she wouldn't have said any such thing to me as that I was one. Because I wasn't one! Not about that! I had never hit Sammy Martin. I had never done anything to him but give him candy once in a while.
“George!” said my mother, and she was sad about it, as if she was now quite hopeless about me.
Then she went on, as quietly as if we were at a funeral:
“That poor child's mother came here to beg me to protect her child against you—to beg me to ask you not to harm him again! You called him to the fence and struck him across the face with a stick or a switch. Oh, don't deny it! She has seen you coax him to the fence before and give him candy, and when he came crying to her with a welt rising on his poor face, he told her you had done it. And I thought you were—I thought—”
So then she cried, and I couldn't do anything but stand there and feel—oh, I don't know how I felt! I guess I had never felt like that in my life. It wasn't so, and I knew it wasn't so, and nobody would ever believe it wasn't so. I couldn't do anything but stand there and wish I was dead or grown up or something. I just stood and looked down, and once in a while I blinked. So then, after a while, my mother wiped her eyes and walked past me without saying anything or looking at me and went into the house, and I stood there awhile and then I sort of turned and went to the edge of the porch and sneaked around to the back yard. It wasn't fair to think such things of me when they were not so, and I felt awful bad. I never wanted to see my mother again. So then Swatty saw me and shouted.
“Come on!” he yelled. “We've got her done! She's a dandy!”
So I ran to where the capstan was, and she was a dandy!