and changing her mind.

"You never brung me up," he answered with sad kindliness. "I brung
myself up, ma, an' I brung up Will. He's bigger'n me, an' heavier, an'
taller. When I was a kid, I reckon I didn't git enough to eat. When he
come along an' was a kid, I was workin' an' earnin' grub for him too.
But that's done with. Will can go to work, same as me, or he can go to
hell, I don't care which. I'm tired. I'm goin' now. Ain't you goin' to
say goodbye?"

She made no reply. The apron had gone over her head again, and she was
crying. He paused a moment in the doorway.

"I'm sure I done the best I knew how," she was sobbing.

He passed out of the house and down the street. A wan delight came
into his face at the sight of the lone tree. "Jes' ain't goin' to do
nothin'," he said to himself, half aloud, in a crooning tone. He glanced
wistfully up at the sky, but the bright sun dazzled and blinded him.

It was a long walk he took, and he did not walk fast. It took him past
the jute-mill. The muffled roar of the loom room came to his ears, and
he smiled. It was a gentle, placid smile. He hated no one, not even the
pounding, shrieking machines. There was no bitterness in him, nothing
but an inordinate hunger for rest.

The houses and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as
he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was
walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk
like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human.
It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled
like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested,
grotesque and terrible.

He passed by a small railroad station and lay down in the grass under a
tree. All afternoon he lay there. Sometimes he dozed, with muscles that
twitched in his sleep. When awake, he lay without movement, watching the
birds or looking up at the sky through the branches of the tree above
him. Once or twice he laughed aloud, but without relevance to anything
he had seen or felt.

After twilight had gone, in the first darkness of the night, a freight
train rumbled into the station. When the engine was switching cars on to
the side-track, Johnny crept along the side of the train. He pulled open
the side-door of an empty box-car and awkwardly and laboriously climbed
in. He closed the door. The engine whistled. Johnny was lying down, and
in the darkness he smiled.