Her face wrinkled up in the foolish grin he knew so well.  “Lord, how you scared me, Mr. Claude!  A little more’n I’d ‘a’ had my mush all over the floor.  You lookin’ fine, you nice boy, you!”

He knew Mahailey was gladder to see him come home than any one except his mother.  Hearing Mrs. Wheeler’s wandering, uncertain steps in the enclosed stairway, he opened the door and ran halfway up to meet her, putting his arm about her with the almost painful tenderness he always felt, but seldom was at liberty to show.  She reached up both hands and stroked his hair for a moment, laughing as one does to a little boy, and telling him she believed it was redder every time he came back.

“Have we got all the corn in, Mother?”

“No, Claude, we haven’t.  You know we’re always behindhand.  It’s been fine, open weather for husking, too.  But at least we’ve got rid of that miserable Jerry; so there’s something to be thankful for.  He had one of his fits of temper in town one day, when he was hitching up to come home, and Leonard Dawson saw him beat one of our horses with the neck-yoke.  Leonard told your father, and spoke his mind, and your father discharged Jerry.  If you or Ralph had told him, he most likely wouldn’t have done anything about it.  But I guess all fathers are the same.”  She chuckled confidingly, leaning on Claude’s arm as they descended the stairs.

“I guess so.  Did he hurt the horse much?  Which one was it?”

“The little black, Pompey.  I believe he is rather a mean horse.  The men said one of the bones over the eye was broken, but he would probably come round all right.”

“Pompey isn’t mean; he’s nervous.  All the horses hated Jerry, and they had good reason to.”  Claude jerked his shoulders to shake off disgusting recollections of this mongrel man which flashed back into his mind.  He had seen things happen in the barn that he positively couldn’t tell his father.  Mr. Wheeler came into the kitchen and stopped on his way upstairs long enough to say, “Hello, Claude.  You look pretty well.”

“Yes, sir.  I’m all right, thank you.”

“Bayliss tells me you’ve been playing football a good deal.”

“Not more than usual.  We played half a dozen games; generally got licked.  The State has a fine team, though.”

“I ex-pect,” Mr. Wheeler drawled as he strode upstairs.

Supper went as usual.  Dan kept grinning and blinking at Claude, trying to discover whether he had already been informed of Jerry’s fate.  Ralph told him the neighbourhood gossip:  Gus Yoeder, their German neighbour, was bringing suit against a farmer who had shot his dog.  Leonard Dawson was going to marry Susie Grey.  She was the girl on whose account Leonard had slapped Bayliss, Claude remembered.