"You're a sweet soul, Benjamin, to gi' me that out of the good learning you got. I call that an act of kindness to an old fart that's wallowed in ignorance and sin all his days, I won't forget it, I could kiss your foot. I used to could sing, Benjamin. At Mother Gilly's house they'd use to _ask_ me to sing, every smock there would ask me--her house was in Stepney, not far from the Mile End Road. 'Brave Benbow lost his legs'--that's a song I picked up from a chapman come by your father's house, Benjamin, I think it was last year. 'Brave Benbow'--oh, bugger me blind if I a'n't forgot it, anyway there was better songs in the days of King Charles that won't come again, needn't to think they will, boy. That's all past, that is...." Ben's hand had relaxed. Reuben broke free and plunged blindly ahead to drop face down in the snow, not rising. Here the road curved near the frozen expanse of the Connecticut. Distant in the south smoke threaded into the clouds, the smoke of decent fires--Hatfield village, warmth and safety. Ben raised Reuben's limply protesting body, brushing white smears from his face and collar. Jesse stood by, trying to drink from an empty flask. "Ru, brother----" "I can't go on, nor I will not." "You must." "I cursed you." "What? That?--you know that was nothing." "I'm rotten with sin. I let it happen. I did nothing. And yesterday she chided me for using an ugly word, and I went out into the shed and I--and----" "That's nothing." "You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be damned forever." "No. No...." Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology. "Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam." "I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen." "Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee." * * * * *