“‘G’wan!’ I says to him, ‘Who you talkin’ to?  I don’t have to take nothin’ from you nor nobody like you,’ I says.  ’I’m as good as you are any day, and better.  You can have your dirty job,’ I says.  And with that I give him my time and walked out on ’m.  Je’s, he was sore!”

They would listen to him, appreciatively, but with certain mental reservations; reservations inevitable when a speaker’s name is Buzz.  One by one they would melt away as their particular girl, after flaunting by with a giggle and a sidelong glance for the dozenth time, would switch her skirts around the corner of Outagamie Street past the Brill House, homeward bound.

“Well, s’long,” they would say.  And lounging after her, would overtake her in the shadow of the row of trees in front of the Agassiz School.

If the Werner family had been city folk they would, perforce, have burrowed in one of those rabbit-warren tenements that line block after block of city streets.  But your small-town labouring man is likely to own his two-story frame house with a garden patch in the back and a cement walk leading up to the front porch, and pork roast on Sundays.  The Werners had all this, no thanks to Pa Werner; no thanks to Buzz, surely; and little to Minnie Werner who clerked in the Sugar Bowl Candy Store and tried to dress like Angie Hatton whose father owned the biggest Pulp and Paper mill in the Fox River Valley.  No, the house and the garden, the porch and the cement sidewalk, and the pork roast all had their origin in Ma Werner’s tireless energy, in Ma Werner’s thrift; in her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back, her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that is) love for her children.  Pa Werner—­sullen, lazy, brooding, tyrannical—­she soothed and mollified for the children’s sake, or shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required.  An expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not quarrelled with the foreman.  An anarchist, Pa—­dissatisfied with things as they were, but with no plan for improving them.  His evil-smelling pipe between his lips, he would sit, stocking-footed, in silence, smoking and thinking vague, formless, surly thoughts.  This sullen unrest and rebellion it was that, transmitted to his son, had made Buzz the unruly braggart that he was, and which, twenty or thirty years hence, would find him just such a one as his father—­useless, evil-tempered, half brutal, defiant of order.

It was in May, a fine warm sunny day, that Ma Werner, looking up from the garden patch where she was spading, a man’s old battered felt hat perched grotesquely atop her white head, saw Buzz lounging homeward, cutting across lots from Bates Street, his dinner pail glinting in the sun.  It was four o’clock in the afternoon.  Ma Werner straightened painfully and her over-flushed face took on a purplish tinge.  She wiped her moist chin with an apron-corner.