Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.

"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."

In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.

"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure," he thought.

The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
drunken carousing.

"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
now all the days of my life," thought the boy.

In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house