Well, mother gave me a long talking to, after that. Not scolding, but conversation, just as if I was a human being. Somehow it's easier to get along with me that way.
I reckon I averaged three sessions a week in the woodshed, but father might as well have walloped a lime-kiln, for all the tears he drew out of me.
Yet let mother talk to me in her quiet way—easy and gentle, the words soaking in, and the first thing you knew, I had a lump in my throat, and some blamed thing got in my eyes.
I wanted to do what was right by all of them, I certainly did. It was a misfit all round, there's where the trouble come. Father couldn't possibly enter into my feelings. Sixteen I was, staggering with strength, red-headed, and aching to be at something all the time. It ain't in reason I could remember to put one foot before the other—right-left, right-left, day in and day out.
Then, as soon as I'd cleaned up all the boys in our place, every young man for miles around who made pretensions to being double-handed came to find what I was made of.
It's all right to say don't fight, but when this young man slouched along and cast disparagin' eyes in my direction, it was plain somebody had to be hurt, and it might as well not be me.
Honest, I'd rather have been in the woods, fishing, or just laying on my back, watching the pines swinging over me, so slow, so regular, tasting the smell of 'em, and fancying I was an Injun or Mr. Ivanhoe, or whatever idee was uppermost at the time, than out in the dusty road, smiting my fellow-man. But if you should be mean enough to ask me if I took no pleasure in the art of assault and battery, I'd have to admit a slight inclination.
Not that I wanted to hurt anybody, either—small malice there was in those mix-ups! I reckon, with the other lad, as with me, it was more a case of doing your little darnedest—of letting out all you held, once in so often—that made the interest.
But father was powerful opposed to scrapping, and, of course, mother didn't like it, neither. The only place a woman likes a row is in a book.
Women is fond of bargains. They like a fine fight with no bills to pay.