“Why can’t I have a Pa and Ma that don’t fight all the time?” he cried hysterically. “Other fellows do! Why can’t I? Oh, Ma! Ma! Ma!” I tried to console him but I was rather ill myself. Somehow I felt responsible for Mrs. Forge’s death, not having reached the stream in time to intercept and dissuade her. My own face was awash with tears as I tried to persuade my friend to go home and tell his dad. “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. “I heard him say it was a hell of a home,” Nathan told me afterward. VI Outside of parental incompatibility, the other bane of Nat’s life in those years was the manner in which his father compelled him to dress. A high-strung, sensitive lad, naturally fastidious, he could not have suffered a worse handicap in the matter of polish and poise in later years than resulted from Johnathan’s policy of dressing his family. The boy was the butt of the school for his oddities of raiment. Johnathan’s idea of clothing was merely something to cover primeval nakedness. The first new suit the boy possessed he purchased with money he had made running errands. Invariably he wore coats and trousers cut down from those his father had discarded. This would not have been so bad if his mother had been any sort of tailoress. But she was slovenly with needle and scissors and the jests of his school companions were Chinese cruelty. “The Scarecrow” they called him.