My heart was going like a steam engine.  At the last moment I started to run, my legs sinking beneath me.  He was upon me with my first few steps, and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over me.

Then an amazing thing happened inside me.  It seemed that the blows were descending on someone else, not me.  The pain of them was a dull, far-away thing.  Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other children as “Skinny Gregory” and “Spider-Legs”) a man’s slow fury was kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year.  It didn’t matter.  When I grew up I would kill him for this.

I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I had ever learned or heard.  This, and the astounding fact that I no longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop.  But he sent me an extra blow for good measure as he flung me aside.  That blow rattled about my head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed.  I saw a shower of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.

I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me.  I heard, far off, my uncle’s voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright sounding through it....

“Johnnie, Johnnie ...  I’m so sorry ...  Johnnie, only speak to me!” He was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus’ dance.

He began tending me gently like a woman.  He built a fire and made some coffee over it—­he had brought coffee and some lunch.  I crouched white and still, saying not a word.

Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee.  His shotgun, leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye.  I crept toward that shotgun.  I trembled with anticipatory pleasure.  God, but now I would pay him back!...

But it was too heavy.  I had struggled and brought it up, however, half to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan.  He looked about.

He went as pale as a sheet of paper.

“—­God, Johnnie!” he almost screamed my name.

I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.

“Johnnie, were you—­were you?” he faltered, unnerved.

“Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I’m sorry I didn’t.”

All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.

“Yes, and I’ll tell you what, you big, dirty ——­, I’ll kill you yet, when I grow big.”

* * * * *

That night I fainted at supper.  When Granma put me to bed she saw how bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after Uncle Lan—­turned into a furious thing.

* * * * *

Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever.  They used the starvation cure for it, in those days.  When they began to give me solid food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.