He noticed that his father was trembling. At a crosswalk he caught gropingly at his son’s arm.
“We’ll have some victuals,” said the Inger, and led him to a little restaurant. His father followed obediently; but the food they set before him remained untouched. He sat there weakly, drank cold water, and assented eagerly when the Inger suggested that he go to bed.
In the Inger’s little room he sank on the edge of the single bed, and the Inger was unspeakably shocked to see him cry.
“What, Dad?” he could only say over uncomfortably. “What?”
“I wish’t I could ’a’ settled with him,” his father said. “I wish’t I could ’a’ settled one varmint before I die.”
“What’d you want to muss with him for?” he inquired impatiently.
“Because I ain’t never done much of anything that was much of anything,” the old man said. He straightened himself. “An’ I could of did this!” he added with abrupt energy.
The Inger studied him intently. The great rugged bones of the older man and the big, thick, ineffectual hands suddenly spoke to him, out of the deep of this undirected life. They had wanted to act—those bones and those hands!
“He wasn’t worth the powder,” the Inger said, but he was not thinking of what he said. He was staring at the tears rolling down the old man’s face. “Get to bed—get to bed, Dad,” he kept insisting.
But first his father would tell him, in fragments, disjointed, pieced together by the Inger’s guesses, how his presence there had come about.