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tried whipping before: he was too tough to hurt. Sending him home would just be giving him a chance to go out in the woods and have some fun. So now, smelling a way of humiliating him (the only way he could be hurt), she slapped her ruler down on the desk and walked over to him with a wicked and wintry smile. “Of course, Harry,” she said, “you’re too brilliant to need any training in reading. But suppose—just suppose, now—you take your book and read to us for the rest of the afternoon, pronouncing every word! We’ll let geography go, just for the pleasure of listening to you. Go on down to your desk and get your reader.”
    The class snickered. Harry grinned, shaking his head. “I don’t need any book,” he said.
    â€œI suppose you know it all by heart!”
    â€œI’ve read it over. When you’re smart that’s all it takes.”
    â€œAll right!” she squealed, so outraged at his impudence that her voice cracked. “You can start right at the beginning.” With her back stiff and her face tomato red, she marched back to her desk and sat down, her book open before her, ready to pounce on his slightest mistake.
    At four o‘clock she reluctantly turned him and the rest of the class loose. He had reached page ninety-two with only a few minor errors.
    Harry Mason had good reason to hate his father, and he took advantage of his reasons. By the time the boy was fourteen he was big for his age and hard as flint from an active life of hunting and sports. Yet the beatings that had soured his childhood went on as if he were still a child. All the boys except Elmer had left, George to Chicago, Oscar and Bill to nearby farms, Dave to drive a dray in Davenport. As a result, whenever a neighbor missed a chicken, or complained of kids in his melon patch, or had his buggy wheels taken off and hung on the ridge of his barn on Hallowe‘en, or found some youth toying with his daughter in the haymow, Harry had to look sharp if he wanted to avoid a tanning for it. Sometimes he was guilty, sometimes not. Sometimes he got beaten for Elmer’s misdeeds because Elmer was too big at sixteen to be handled.
    The procedure was monotonously reiterative. Fred Mason would lay for his one punishable son whenever he heard of a prank or theft. If he caught him (as he seldom did, and the infrequency of his success only whetted his wrath) he would take him out on the porch in full view of the offended public and administer punishment there. Because of his missing arm, he couldn’t both hold and whip the boy, and so he held him by the collar and kicked his backside with brutal shoes, or hammered his head against a porch pillar. The more he kicked and hammered, the madder he got, and the more stubborn the boy’s grim silence became. He never cried for pain, but sometimes after a thumping he would go off in the woods and throw himself on the ground and weep with rage and hatred. Once or twice he ran away, to be gone for two or three weeks, but he always came back, until one day in the summer of his fourteenth year.
    In that July Fred Mason had had one of his occasional spells of ambition, had got together a couple of scythes, and had contracted to cut off the hay in the river meadow west of town. Elmer and Harry were impressed as free labor. They went unwillingly enough, but before they had been working half an hour they got into a race to see who could mow the greatest swath by noon. They shucked their shirts and slaved mightily in the early heat, while their father sat with his back against a tree, smoking his corncob.
    Heads down, elbows bent, arms and shoulders swinging, the boys went down the field of damp grass close together, mowing almost in unison. At the fence along the road they turned and started back, still together. Then Elmer, two years older and a little bigger, began to inch ahead, and Harry strained to catch him, reaching for the exact cutting power of