"You have made me wish that a thousand times, Tom," she answered with passionate bitterness. "See that wasted arm," and suiting the action to her words she stripped up her sleeve; "look at my fleshless face--what has brought me to this but starvation and drudgery? Hear the moaning of that helpless babe in the cradle, crying for nurse that starvation has dried up. Oh, Tom! how can you spend your money in whiskey when you know we are starving at home? You knew when you left this morning there was not a morsel of food in the house, nor money to buy it, for you have not brought in a cent for weeks, and you promised when you left to come right back with bread, but instead of that you have spent the day in drinking whiskey and fighting with great hulking loafers like yourself, and now you come home to abuse your wife and children. You are worse than a brute; for brutes do provide for their own flesh and blood, while you have nothing better than oaths and blows for yours." With fearful oaths Flatt sprang forward to answer his wife's passionate arraignment of his conduct by the method he usually adopted on such occasions--that was, by the irresistible logic of his ponderous fist. As she saw he was about to make the rush, her first impulse was to open the door and run for safety, for well she knew, from a terrible experience, that when he was aroused he had the ferocity of a brute with the temper of a demon. But as she was about to do so she saw he did not heed the cradle which lay in his way. The danger of her child caused the mother to be heedless of her own, and, with the wild cry, "Look out for the babe, Tom!" she sprang forward and snatched it from the cradle, thus bringing herself into the power of the furious brute. In his mad rage he picked up a trowel which, unfortunately, lay near him, and, as his wife was rising with her babe, he struck her with terrific force upon the head, the sharp corner of the instrument cutting through the flesh and imbedding itself deep into the skull, carrying the hair with it. "Oh, Tom! you have killed me!" she groaned, as she fell forward on her face, covering her babe as she fell. But even in that terrible moment she must have had some thought of it, for she managed to shift over on her side, clasping it to her breast as she did so. All the ferocity in Tom's brutal nature seemed to be aroused, and the sight of his wife's blood running down over her forehead and dyeing with red the pallid face of his child, which one would think might have moved even a demon to pity, only seemed to arouse the latent tiger within him, for he struck the prostrate woman again and again, until she settled heavily on to the floor and was limp and still. This act in the tragedy was complete, for Nancy Flatt was dead, and her infant lay clasped in her arms bespattered with the life-blood of its dead mother.