Part 17

“Then you just couldn't get home sooner, could you? Something you couldn't help kept you away, didn't it?”

Bill shook his head slowly. “No,” he answered easily. “I could have come home much sooner.”

“Billy, dear, what DID happen?” She was beginning to feel panicky; he was courting distress.

“Nothing, mother. I just felt like staying in the reading-room and reading--”

“Oh, you HAD to do some lessons, didn't you! Miss Roberts should have known better--”

“I didn't have to stay in--I wanted to.”

Martin still kept silent, his eyes looking over the newspaper wide open, staring, the muscles of his jaw relaxed. The boy was quick to sense that he was winning--the simple, non-resistance of the lamb was confounding his father.

“I wanted to stay. I read a book, and then I took a walk, and then I dropped in at the restaurant for a bite, and then I walked around some more, and then I went to a movie.”

“Billy, what are you saying?”

Martin, slowly putting down his paper, remarked without stressing a syllable:

“You had better go to bed, Bill; at once, without arguing.”

Bill moved towards the parlor, as though to obey. At the door he stopped a moment and said: “I wasn't arguing; I was just answering mother. She wanted to know.”

“She does not want to know.”

“Then I wanted her to know that I don't intend to work after school any more. I'll do my chores in the morning, but that's all. From now on nobody can MAKE me do anything.”

“I am not asking you to do anything but go to bed.”

“I don't intend to come home tomorrow afternoon until I'm ready. Or any afternoon. And if you don't like it--”

“Billy!” his mother cried; “Billy! go to bed!”

The boy obeyed.

Bill was fifteen when this took place. The impossible had happened. He had challenged the master and had won. Even after he had turned in, his father remained silent, feeling a secret respect for him; mysteriously he had grown suddenly to manhood. Martin was too mental to let anger express itself in violence and, besides, strangely enough, he felt no desire to punish; there was still the dislike he had always felt for him--his son who was the son of this woman, but though he would never have confessed aloud the satisfaction it gave him, he began to see there was in the boy more than a little of himself.

“Poor Billy,” his mother apologized; “he's tired.”

“He didn't say he was tired--”

“Then he did say he was tired of working evenings.”

“That's different.”

“Yes, it's different, Martin; but can you make him work?”

“No, I don't intend to try. He isn't my slave.”

With overwhelming pride in her eyes, pride that shook her voice, she exclaimed: “Not anybody's slave, and not afraid to declare it. Billy is a different kind of a boy. He doesn't like the farm--he hates it--”

“I know.”

“He loathes everything about it. Only the other day he told me he wished he could take it and tear it board from board, and leave it just a piece of bleak prairie, as it was when your father brought you here, Martin.”