“I climbed out on the shed roof and skun away,” cried Nathan. “I’m scared stiff to go home again—ever! He’ll whale the daylights out o’ me fer tellin’ anybody about it, even you!”
“We better go somewheres,” I argued. “We can’t save her now. And we can’t stay out here all night. You better come home with me, and I’ll tell my Ma and she’ll see what you better do. She ain’t afraid of your Pa! She’ll tell him what she thinks of him. My Ma’s great at tellin’ your folks what she thinks of ’em!”
I persuaded Nat to come home with me. It was a tragic return.
My mother gathered us against her ample bosom, an arm about each of us, while she listened to the horror of the thing we blurted out. Then she smiled sadly and kissed us.
“Bless your hearts! Nathan’s mother has been here with me, telling me about it,” mother said. “She must have turned back through Pine Street while you were on the way to the river. She wouldn’t kill herself. She loves Nathan too much to do that. She said so!”
V
Nathan’s mother went home that night and when she reentered the house, John Forge looked up from his paper and said:
“Huh! Back, are you? I thought so!”
The mother passed up to bed with some hot retort about “her life belonging to her children”.
But she cried all that night and John Forge slept on the downstairs sofa.