her brother supplemented. "An' I know for a fact that he
keeps a keg in the house all the time as well."

"Maybe you've been guzzling from it," Sarah snapped.

"Maybe I have," Tom said, wiping his mouth reminiscently with the back
of his hand.

"Well, he can afford to keep a keg in the house if he wants to," she
returned to the attack, which now was directed at her husband as well.
"He pays his bills, and he certainly makes good money--better than most
men, anyway."

"An' he hasn't a wife an' children to watch out for," Tom said.

"Nor everlastin' dues to unions that don't do him no good."

"Oh, yes, he has," Tom urged genially. "Blamed little he'd work in that
shop, or any other shop in Oakland, if he didn't keep in good standing
with the Blacksmiths. You don't understand labor conditions, Sarah. The
unions have got to stick, if the men aren't to starve to death."

"Oh, of course not," Sarah sniffed. "I don't understand anything.
I ain't got a mind. I'm a fool, an' you tell me so right before the
children." She turned savagely on her eldest, who startled and shrank
away. "Willie, your mother is a fool. Do you get that? Your father says
she's a fool--says it right before her face and yourn. She's just a
plain fool. Next he'll be sayin' she's crazy an' puttin' her away in
the asylum. An' how will you like that, Willie? How will you like to see
your mother in a straitjacket an' a padded cell, shut out from the light
of the sun an' beaten like a nigger before the war, Willie, beaten an'
clubbed like a regular black nigger? That's the kind of a father you've
got, Willie. Think of it, Willie, in a padded cell, the mother that
bore you, with the lunatics screechin' an' screamin' all around, an' the
quick-lime eatin' into the dead bodies of them that's beaten to death by
the cruel wardens--"

She continued tirelessly, painting with pessimistic strokes the growing
black future her husband was meditating for her, while the boy, fearful
of some vague, incomprehensible catastrophe, began to weep silently,
with a pendulous, trembling underlip. Saxon, for the moment, lost
control of herself.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, can't we be together five minutes without
quarreling?" she blazed.

Sarah broke off from asylum conjurations and turned upon her
sister-in-law.

"Who's quarreling? Can't I open my head without bein' jumped on by the
two of you?"

Saxon shrugged her shoulders despairingly, and Sarah swung about on her
hus