As Buzz espied her his gait became a swagger.  At sight of that swagger Ma knew.  She dropped her spade and plodded heavily through the freshly turned earth to the back porch as Buzz turned in at the walk.  She shifted her weight ponderously as she wiped first one earth-crusted shoe and then the other.

“What’s the matter, Ernie?  You ain’t sick, are you?”

“Naw.”

“What you home so early for?”

“Because I feel like it, that’s why.”

He took the back steps at a bound and slammed the kitchen door behind him.  Ma Werner followed heavily after.  Buzz was hanging his hat up behind the kitchen door.  He turned with a scowl as his mother entered.  She looked even more ludicrous in the house than she had outside, with her skirts tucked up to make spading the easier, so that there was displayed an unseemly length of thick ankle rising solidly above the old pair of men’s side-boots that encased her feet.  The battered hat perched rakishly atop her knob of gray-white hair gave her a jaunty, sporting look, as of a ponderous, burlesque Watteau.

She abandoned pretense.  “Ernie, your pa’ll be awful mad.  You know the way he carried on the last time.”

“Let him.  He aint worked five days himself this month.”  Then, at a sudden sound from the front of the house, “He ain’t home, is he?”

“That’s the shade flapping.”

Buzz turned toward the inside wooden stairway that led to the half-story above.  But his mother followed, with surprising agility for so heavy a woman.  She put a hand on his arm.  “Such a good-payin’ job, Ernie.  An’ you said only yesterday you liked it.  Somethin’ must’ve happened.”

There broke a grim little laugh from Buzz.  “Believe me something happened good an’ plenty.”  A little frightened look came into his eyes.  “I just had a run-in with young Hatton.”

The red faded from her face and a grey-white mask seemed to slip down over it.  “You don’t mean Hatton!  Not Hatton’s son.  Ernie, you ain’t done—­”

A dash of his street-corner bravado came back to him.  “Aw, keep your hair on, Ma.  I didn’t know it was young Hatton when I hit’m.  An’ anyway nobody his age is gonna tell me where to get off at.  Say, w’en a guy who ain’t twenty-three, hardly, and that never done a lick in his life except go to college, the sissy, tries t’—­”

But the first sentence only had penetrated her brain.  She grappled with it, dizzily.  “Hit him!  Ernie, you don’t mean you hit him!  Not Hatton’s son!  Ernie!”

“Sure I did.  You oughta seen his face.”  But there was very little triumph or satisfaction in Buzz Werner’s face or voice as he said it.  “Course, I didn’t know it was him when I done it.  I dunno would it have made any difference if I had.”

She seemed so old and so shrunken, in spite of her bulk, as she looked up at him.  The look in her eyes was so strained.  The way her hand brought her apron-corner up to her mouth, as though to stifle the fear that shook her, was so groping, somehow, so uncertain, that, paradoxically, the pitifulness of it reacted to make him savage.