in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.

Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
tell her about it.

Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."

Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."

A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"

Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a sick,
half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."

Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the