I could not see her haggard face for my tears.
She laughed,—a queer, tired, tender laugh. Then she kissed me again and was gone. My grief was mercifully merged in slumber.
VI
It was a week before Nathan left his bed. His father threw an ax handle at me when I went around to the rear of the Forge premises to see if Nathan could come out to play.
I think Johnathan was a bit ashamed of himself and likewise afraid. He took this gentle method of suggesting that the neighbors, particularly the neighbors’ offspring, keep out of his family affairs. Because Nathan had dropped unconscious during his subsequent chastisement and remained unconscious all night. Next day a doctor was summoned. The doctor was told that Nathan must have eaten something which had failed to agree with him.
I finally figured out, in a boyish way, what was amiss in Nathan’s relation to his parents, particularly his father.
Obedience, to Johnathan, consisted in a child instinctively knowing beforehand the thing to which the parental mind objected and avoiding consummation of that thing like a pestilence. Then, too, floggings and thrashings were uniformly good for a youngster. They gave him character and made him love and respect his dear parents when he had grown to manhood and looked back on what an exasperating little devil he had been and how much he had “tried” those who had done the most for him.