Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.
At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."
In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of his
mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off alone into
the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
ring.
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