Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: “I am going to quit the schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same.”
Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called sharply, “Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here.”
A startled, trembling voice answered from above, “Who is it?”
Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand gently on his shoulder, said, “It is your mother and you are only a sick, half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it.”
Sam shook his head. “She is still there in the bed, coughing.” He roused himself and stood up. “I have just killed my father,” he announced. “I choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and wanted to sleep.”
Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam’s presence, raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. “We will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman there.”
In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam. He felt he had accomplished something—something he had set out to accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith’s, began planning the evening he would spend with her.
“I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will do when I go to the city,” he thought.
At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his mother’s bedside.
In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.