"The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up
the road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!"
"Hullo! A whippoorwrn. Takes a man back into childhood-No,
don't 'whip poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now."
He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he
stopped in sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the
garden plowed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with
boards nailed across its dusty cobwebbed windows. The tears
started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently.
In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived
stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of
his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this
decay of her home.
All that last scene came back to him: the booming roar of the
threshing machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud,
merry shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the
lamplight streamed out of that door as he turned away tired,
hungry, sullen with rage and jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the
courage of a man!
Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick. Ed abused her.
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