A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ...  I dreamed still of what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ... torture that would last a long, long while.

He would often see it in my eyes.

“Don’t you look at me that way!” with a swipe of the hand.

* * * * *

Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish—­on their morning webs.

I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.

Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle “Lan,” as we called him, down to see what was the matter....

I took my beating in silence.  I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.  After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.

I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great to live through.

* * * * *

The grey light of morning filtering in.

Lan stood over my bed.

“—­want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin’ blackbirds?”

“Yes, Uncle Lan,” I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and eagerness to go.

In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.  Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as if having waded through a brook.

Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder.  He shot into a tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn, flopping, bleeding.  He thrust them into his sack, which reddened through, and we went on ... still in silence.  The silence began to make me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him.  I conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final whipping—­“to teach me to mind Granma.”

“—­had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted—­they stop me too soon....”

“—­Pity your pa’s away ... don’t do to leave a kid alone with women folks ... they don’t make him walk the chalk enough!”

It was about an hour after sunrise.  We had come to an open field among trees.  Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.

“—­needn’t make to run ...  I can catch you, no matter how fast you go.”

He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.

“Come on and take your medicine ...  I’m goin’ away to-morrow to Halton, and I want to leave you something to remember me by—­so that you’ll obey Ma and Millie while I’m gone.  If you don’t, when I come back, you’ll catch it all over again.”