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contraption in the Rock River.
    His six boys and one girl grew up untended in the shambling old frame house his wife had brought him as dowry. The children learned early to avoid their father, for his one hand was quick at back-handed slaps, and his temper was hair-trigger. A crying or teasing or noisy child set him mad with irritation; he was fond of telling what a damned pest kids were—his especially, the damnedest pack of mongrels ever whelped.
    But if they were mongrels, they had the mongrel’s knack of making his own way. Any one of them above the age of six could have lived on what he could catch or steal. They grew like savages, black-haired, husky, broad-faced children with their mother’s German features and their father’s long bones. Most of their time in summer they spent roaming the wilderness of brushy woods along the Rock River, fishing, robbing garden patches, shooting rabbits and grouse with slingshots or whatever weapon they could lay hands on.
    By the time the youngest boy, Harry, was eight years old, they all had guns. One by one, mysteriously, the firearms came. Fred Mason swore they had been stolen, and stamped around the house whenever a new gun appeared, but he could never beat a confession out of any of the boys. Elmer had worked for a farmer and made the money for his. George had found his lying right out in the open on a bridge rail, and had waited all day to see if anyone would come and claim it, but nobody did. Harry had been given his by a woodchopper up along the river. And so on.
    Probably the boys felt that guns were a necessity, in order to provide food. The chances were two to one that any time they came home for a meal they would be cornered and whipped for something, if not by their father then by their mother, who sometimes flew into insane rages and drove even her hair-trigger husband from the house. So the boys stayed away, at least in summer, and lived on the fish and rabbits and corn and vegetables and watermelons of their expeditions. Sometimes they stayed out in the woods for days at a time.
    In winter there was nothing much to do except go to school. It was a way of avoiding the domestic uproar, and it was a fairly painless way of satisfying parental demands. “My kids gonna have an eddication,” Fred Mason was fond of saying. “They’re gonna learn to read and write and figger if I have to beat it into them with a wagon tongue.”
    But one by one the boys dropped out, found jobs, wandered away. None of them, except Harry, remained in school beyond the fifth grade. Harry stayed till the eighth, partly because he was less indocile than his brothers, partly because he was brighter.
    He was an intractable enough pupil, and the cause of much academic grief, but his intelligence and his sense of self-preservation were sharp enough to tell him when to stop, and once in a while he got a chance to outface his teacher with some monumental feat of brains.
    His teacher quit picking on him, and gave him his unruly head, when Harry was in the sixth grade. From that day on she looked upon him with something like awe, tinctured with mild horror. They were reading McGuffey’s Second Reader. For three or four weeks Harry slaved like a malicious little demon, reading every selection, prose and poetry, over and over until he knew almost the whole book by heart. The class, meanwhile, had spelled its way through sixty or seventy pages. Harry had ceased utterly to pay attention in reading class, loafed ostentatiously at his bench, whittled his initials, honked weirdly when the teacher’s back was turned and then played he had been blowing his nose, pulled the girls’ braids, pinked his fellows with a peashooter, and raised so much uproar that he was hauled up into the corner and a dunce cap set on his head. From there he grinned and made faces and commented audibly on the reading performances of the others.
    The teacher was in a tooth-gnashing fury. She had