I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what had happened that day in the shed. Father had stood--I shall never know how long--with the heavy stick upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared, with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father. At the moment I had thought that--boy as I was--I understood how such a strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again) were with father. My heart ached for him. He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I have got myself. * * * * * And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks: upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother and for Uncas--two people very well able to take care of themselves. Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother. “What happened?” she asked. And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took it--that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out of his hand.” Mother laughed--a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once. “It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands of a cry-baby,” she said. That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes. Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.