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Suddenly, “There she is again!” shrilled Minnie, from her bedroom. Buzz shrank back in his chair. Old man Werner, with a muttered oath, went to the open doorway and stood there, puffing savage little spurts of smoke streetward. The Kearney girl stared brazenly at him as she strolled slowly by, a slim and sinister figure. Old man Werner watched her until she passed out of sight.

“You go gettin’ mixed up with dirt like that,” threatened he, “and I’ll learn you. She’ll be hangin’ around the mill yet, the brass-faced thing. If I hear of it I’ll get the foreman to put her off the place. You’ll stay home to-night. Carry a pail of water for your ma once.”

“Carry it yourself.”

Buzz, with a wary eye up the street, slouched out to the front porch, into the twilight of the warm May evening. Charley Lembke, from his porch across the street, called to him: “Goin’ down town?”

“Yeh, I guess so.”

“Ain’t you afraid of bein’ pinched?” Buzz turned his head quickly toward the room just behind him. He turned to go in. Charley’s voice came again, clear and far-reaching. “I hear you had a run-in with Hatton’s son, and knocked him down. Some class t’ you, Buzz, even if it does cost you your job.”

From within the sound of a newspaper hurled to the floor. Pa Werner was at the door. “What’s that! What’s that he’s sayin’?”

Buzz, cornered, jutted a threatening jaw at his father and brazened it out. “Can’t you hear good?”

“Come on in here.”

Buzz hesitated a moment. Then he turned, slowly, and walked into the little sitting room with an attempt at a swagger that failed to convince even himself. He leaned against the side of the door, hands in pockets. Pa Werner faced him, black-browed. “Is that right, what he said? Lembke? Huh?”

“Sure it’s right. I had a run-in with Hatton, an’ licked him, and give’m my time. What you goin’ to do about it?”

Ma Werner was in the room, now. Minnie, passing through on her way to work again, caught the electric current of the storm about to break and escaped it with a parting:

“Oh, for the land’s sakes! You two. Always a-fighting.”

The two men faced each other. The one a sturdy man-boy nearing twenty, with a great pair of shoulders and a clear eye, a long, quick arm and a deft hand–these last his assets as a workman. The other, gnarled, prematurely wrinkled, almost gnome-like. This one took his pipe from between his lips and began to speak. The drink he had had at Wenzel’s on the way home sparked his speech.

He began with a string of epithets. They flowed from his lips, an acid stream. Pick and choose as I will, there is none that can be repeated here. Old Man Werner had, perhaps, been something of a tough guy himself, in his youth. As he reviled his son now you saw that son, at fifty, just such another stocking-footed, bitter old man, smoking a glum pipe on the back porch, summer evenings, and spitting into the fresh young grass.

I don’t say that this thought came to Buzz as his father flayed him with his abuse. But there was something unusual, surely, in the non-resistance with which he allowed the storm to beat about his head. Something in his steady, unruffled gaze caused the other man to falter a little in his tirade, and finally to stop, almost apprehensively. He had paid no heed to Ma Werner’s attempts at pacification. “Now, Pa!” she had said, over and over, her hand on his arm, though he shook it off again and again. “Now, Pa!–” But he stopped now, fist raised in a last profane period. Buzz stood regarding him with his unblinking stare.

Finally: “You through?” said Buzz.

“Ya-as,” snarled Pa, “I’m through. Get to hell out of here. You’ll be hung yet, you loafer. A good-for-nothing bum, that’s what. Get out o’ here!”