“All right, Pa. Only to-morrow morning I won’t be here. You’ll never do it again.”
“I’ll have the law on you and fetch you back!”
“The law’ll never know where I am—to fetch me back.”
For the first time, Johnathan stood checkmate. That queer, hard ring in his incorrigible son’s voice told him subconsciously that he was close to the end of seventeen years of bullying.
Such a thing had never happened before. His wife had fought with him, indeed, but it had always been a “chewing match.” Though he had never struck her, the fact remained that he could strike her and beat her up thoroughly, if he chose. He had a feeling, however, that if he went beyond a certain point with Nathan, the devil had hold of his son’s soul just hard enough so that Johnathan might encounter the distressing predicament of not being able to come off victor. Nathan had whipped the Plumb fellow. The Plumb fellow was larger than Johnathan. In popular parlance, Johnathan was rather “up against it.”
The father did a strange thing. He arose abruptly, turned and walked from the room. Nathan heard him pass through the hall, out the front door, across the veranda and down the steps.
Why had he gone? Where was he headed? This silent, abrupt, unexplained, ominous departure unnerved the lad more than any commencement of fistic hostilities.
Johnathan Forge did not return that evening. All that night he walked the streets, debating whether he should call down God’s curses on his boy. He actually believed that if he did, the son’s life would be blasted forever. Morning came cold and gray and clammy across the eastern hills.
But in the morning the Forge household resumed the even tenor of its way. Only Johnathan did not speak to his son for four days and then only on matters of absolute necessity.
Nathan, however, had made a discovery. This is a world in which people suffer and endure exactly what they choose to suffer and not much more. When the worm turns, ninety per cent. of the early birds turn also.