It cost Sammy's father many a dollar to square it with Gray's folks. They were a hard outfit, anyhow—what is called white trash down South. The father used to get drunk, come home, break the furniture, and throw the old woman out of the house; that is, if she didn't happen to be drunk at the time. In the last case, he come home, got the furniture broke on him, and was thrown out of the house.
It wasn't an ideal home, like Miss Doolittle is always talking about. The kids gave Sandy a wide berth after the shooting, but my sympathies went out to him. He was a good opening, you see. I want to state right here, though, it wasn't all getting my name up. All my life I've had a womanish horror of men or animals with their gear out of order. I'd walk ten mile to dodge a cripple. And this here Sandy, with his queer little hop, and his little claw hands, and his twist to one side, and his long nose, and his little black eyes, and his black hair hanging in streaks down on his yaller and dirt-colored face, looked like nothing else on earth so much as a boiled pet crow.
When I jumped over the Grays' back fence, I see my friend Sandy playing behind the ruin they called a barn. Execution was the game he played. He had a gallows fixed up real natural. Just as I come up he was hanging a cat.
"The Lord have mercy on your soul!" squeaks Sandy, pulling the drop. Down goes the cat, wriggling so natural she near lost a half a dozen of her lives before I recovered enough to interfere. I resisted a craving to kick Mr. Sandy over the barn, and struck in to amuse him at something else. First off, he hung back, but by and by I had him tearing around lively, because we were aboard ship with a storm coming up to port, a pirate to sta'bbud, breakers forrud, and a rocky coast aft. Anybody would step quick under them conditions. So Sandy he moseyed aloft and hollered down the pirates was gaining on us, the storm approaching fast, the breakers breaking worse than ever, and the rock-bound coast holding its own. I hastily mounted three cord wood cannon, reefed the barn door, and battened down the hatches in the chicken-coop, without a hen being the wiser.
We were in the most interesting part when an unexpected enemy arrived on the scene, in the person of Sandy's mother, and did us in a single pass. She saw him up in the tree; she give me one glare and begun to talk.
I climbed the fence and went home. All the way back I felt this was a wicked and ungrateful world. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I wanted to get to my own room without mother's seeing me, but she came to the head of the stair when I was half up. "Well, son," she says, smiling so it didn't seem quite such a desert, "how did you make out with the little Gray boy?"
"Oh, not anything special," says I, airily, hoping to pass by.
"Come in and tell me," she says. So I went in, hedging at first, but limbering up when she stroked my hair. Finally my wrongs come out hot and fast. I told about his hanging the cat, and made it as bad as I could. I enlarged upon the care and pains I spent in leading him into better ways.
"And, then," says I, "just as we were having a good time, that mother of his comes out. And what do you suppose she says?"
Mother rubbed her hand over her mouth, swallowed once or twice, and managed to look as serious as anything. "I can't imagine," she answers; "you tell me."