“But Ma said——”
“Never mind what your mother said. You don’t do what your mother says. You do what I say! March!”
The worst part of that whole picnic-day episode wasn’t the humiliation before all the boys and girls and particularly Bernie, nor the thrashing that followed. It was that his mother had promised immunity, to defend him, to “pay the piper” and did not keep her word.
Johnathan Forge got his boy home, took him out in the woodshed and ordered him to strip to his pelt. Before the flogging began, he prolonged the terror by coddling the weapon of assault—a couple of feet of stiff harness tug—talking to it, explaining to it how he had told his boy to stay away from the picnic and “his boy” had disobeyed; how he had been told to always keep away from girls and had disobeyed there also. Then he laid it on.
Sordid all this to recount? As well delineate Johnathan thrashing his boy around the calendar and be done with it. But it was a matter of principle with Johnathan. He was responsible for his boy’s soul to God. The Bible said so.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
IV
Nathan lay on his bed that night with his arms behind his head and stared up into the dark.
Moment by moment he lived that galaxy of sylvan love over. Branded as with searing iron into his brain was the picture of Bernice Gridley knee-deep in the brook water, or as he had laid her down on the hemlock needles when he had subsequently rescued her.
“I’ve got to marry her! I’ve got to marry her right off,” he told himself. “Grandfather Forge married at sixteen, he said so; and Grandma Forge was only fourteen. That’s only two years older’n me, and what’s two years? I’ll ask her! I’ll ask her to-morrow.”