been on the grounds the full seven open hours for four straight days
that he knew of.

Skag wasn't a liar. He had never "skipped" school before, but the Zoo
had him utterly. He was powerless against himself. Some bigger force,
represented by a truant officer, was necessary to keep him away from
those cages. His father got down to business and gave him a
beating--much against that good man's heart. (Skag's father was a
Northern European who kept a fruit-store down on Waspen street--a
mildly-flavoured man and rotund. His mother was a Mediterranean woman,
who loved and clung.)

But Skag went back to the Zoo. For three days more he went, remained
from opening to closing time. He seemed to fall into deep
absorptions--before tigers and monkeys especially. He didn't hear what
went on around him. He did not appear to miss his lunch. You had to
touch his shoulder to get his attention. The truant officer did this.
It all led dismally to the Reform School from which Skag ran away.

He was gone three weeks and wouldn't have come back then, except his
heart hurt about his mother. He felt the truth--that she was slowly
dying without him. After that for awhile he kept away from the
animals, because his mother loved and clung and cried, when he grew
silently cold with revolt against a life not at all for him, or hot
with hatred against the Reform School. Those were ragged months in
which a less rubbery spirit might have been maimed, but the mother died
before that actually happened. Skag was free--free the same night.

The father's real relation to him had ended with the beating. It was
too bad, for there might have been a decent memory to build on. The
fruit-dealer, however, had been badly frightened by the truant-officer
(in the uniform of a patrolman), and he was just civilised enough to be
a little ashamed that his boy could so far forget the world and all
refined and mild-flavoured things, as to stare through bars at animals
for seven hours a day. In the process of that beating, hell had opened
for Skag. It was associated with the raw smell of blood and a thin red
steam, a little hotter than blood-heat. It always came when he
remembered his father. . . . But his mother meant lilacs. The top
drawer of her dresser had been faintly magic of her. The smell came
when he remembered her. It was like the first rains in the Lake
Country.

But that was all put back. Skag was out in the world now, making it