"Oh well," she emitted, vindictively. "You won't have to inquire far to get the record of N.J. McCarthy. Lordy, no! But now," she started with a heightening of color, "He's got a nice family. Two fine girls, Orlean and Ethel, and his wife is a good little soul, rather helpless and without the force a woman should have; but very nice. But that husband—forget him!"
"This is—er—rather unusual, don't you think?"
"Well, it is," she said. "One would naturally suppose that a man with such a family of moral girls as he has, would not be so—not because he is a preacher." She paused thoughtfully. "Because you know that does not count for a high morality always in our society.... But N.J. McCarthy has been like he is ever since I knew him. He's a rascal of the deep water if the Lord ever made one. And such a hypocrite—there never lived! Added to it, he is the most pious old saint you ever saw! Looks just as innocent as the Christ—and treats his wife like a dog!"
"Oh, no!"
"No!" disdainfully. "Well, you'd better hush!" She paused again, and then as if having reconsidered she turned and said: "I'll not say any more about him. Indeed, I don't like to discuss the man even. He is the very embodiment of rascalism, deceit and hypocrisy. Now, I've said enough. Be a good boy, go out and buy me some cream." And smilingly she got his hat and ushered him outside.
"Well, now what do you think of that," he kept repeating to himself, as he went for the ice cream, "what do you think of that?" Suddenly he halted, and raised his hands to his head. He was thinking, thinking, thinking deeply, reflectively. His mind was going back, back, away back into his youth, his earliest youth—no! It was going—had gone back to his childhood!
"N.J. McCarthy, N.J. McCarthy? Where did I know you! Where, where, where!" His head was throbbing, his brain was struggling with something that happened a long time before. A saloon was just to his left, and into it he turned. He wanted to think; but he didn't want to think too fast. He took a glass of beer. It was late September, but rather warm, and when the cold beverage struck his throat, his mind went back into its yesterdays.
It had happened in the extremely southern portion of the state, in that part commonly referred to as "Egypt," where he then lived. He recalled the incident as it occurred about twenty years before, for he was just five years of age at the time. His mother's baby boy they called him, because he was the youngest of four boys in a large family of children. It was a day in the autumn. He was sure of this because his older brothers had been hunting; they had caught several rabbits and shot a few partridges. He had been allowed to follow for the first time, and had carried the game.... How distinctly it came back to him now.
He had picked the feathers from the quail, and had held the rabbits while his brothers skinned them. And, later, they had placed the game in cold water from their deep well, and had thereupon placed the pan holding the same upon the roof of the summer kitchen, and that night the frost had come. And when morning was again, the ice cold water had drawn the blood from the meat of the game, and the same was clear and white.
"Now, young man," his mother said to him the following morning, "you will get into clean clothes and stay clean, do you understand?"