By this time I had begun to understand why John Rucker was always so cross and cruel to my mother.  He was disappointed because he had supposed when he married her that she had property.  My father had died while a lawsuit for the purpose of settling his father’s estate was pending, and Rucker had thought, and so had my mother, that this lawsuit would soon be ended, and that she would have the property, his share of which had been left to her by my father’s will.  I have never known why the law stood in my mother’s way, or why it was at last that Rucker gave up all hope and vented his spite on my mother and on me.  I do not blame him for feeling put out, for property is property after all, but to abuse me and my mother shows what a bad man he was.  Sometimes he used to call me a damned little beggar.  The first time he did that my mother looked at him with a kind of lost look as if all the happiness in life were gone.  After that, even when a letter came from the lawyers who were looking after the case, holding out hope, and always asking for money, and Rucker for a day or so was quite chipper and affectionate to my mother in a sickening sort of sneaking way, her spirits never rose so far as I could see.  I suppose she was what might be called a broken-hearted woman.

This went on until I was thirteen years old.  I was little and not very strong, and had a cough, caused, perhaps, by the hard steady work, and the lint in the air of the factory.  There were a good many cases every year of the working people there going into declines and dying of consumption; so my mother had taken me out of the factory every time Rucker went away, and tried to make me play.  It was so in all the factories in those days, I guess.  I did not feel like playing, and had no playmates; but I used to go down by the canal and watch the boats go back and forth.  Sometimes the captains of the boats would ask me if I didn’t want a job driving; but I scarcely knew what they meant.  I must have been a very backward child, and I surely was a scared and conquered one.  I used to sit on a stump by the tow-path, and so close to it that the boys driving the mules or horses drawing the boats could almost strike me with their whips, which they often tried to do as they went by.  Then I would scuttle back into the brush and hide.  There was a lock just below, but I seldom went to it because all the drivers were egged on to fight each other during the delay at the locks, and the canallers would have been sure to set them on me for the fun of seeing a fight.

On the most eventful evening of my life, perhaps.  I sat on this stump, watching a boat which, after passing me, was slowing down and stopping.  I heard the captain swearing at some one, and saw him come ashore and start back along the tow-path toward me as if looking for something.  He was a tall man whom I had seen pass at other times, and I was wondering whether he would speak to me or not, when I felt somebody’s hand snatch at my collar, and a whip came down over my thin shirt with a cut which as I write I seem to feel yet.  It was John Rucker, coming home when we were not expecting him, and mad at finding me out of the factory.