r could be depended on only when he
was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not
quarrelled with the foreman. An anarchist, Pa--dissatisfied with things
as they were, but with no plan for improving them. His evil-smelling
pipe between his lips, he would sit, stocking-footed, in silence,
smoking and thinking vague, formless, surly thoughts. This sullen unrest
and rebellion it was that, transmitted to his son, had made Buzz the
unruly braggart that he was, and which, twenty or thirty years hence,
would find him just such a one as his father--useless, evil-tempered,
half brutal, defiant of order.

It was in May, a fine warm sunny day, that Ma Werner, looking up from
the garden patch where she was spading, a man's old battered felt hat
perched grotesquely atop her white head, saw Buzz lounging homeward,
cutting across lots from Bates Street, his dinner pail glinting in the
sun. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Ma Werner straightened
painfully and her over-flushed face took on a purplish tinge. She wiped
her moist chin with an apron-corner.

As Buzz espied her his gait became a swagger. At sight of that swagger
Ma knew. She dropped her spade and plodded heavily through the freshly
turned earth to the back porch as Buzz turned in at the walk. She
shifted her weight ponderously as she wiped first one earth-crusted shoe
and then the other.

"What's the matter, Ernie? You ain't sick, are you?"

"Naw."

"What you home so early for?"

"Because I feel like it, that's why."

He took the back steps at a bound and slammed the kitchen door behind
him. Ma Werner followed heavily after. Buzz was hanging his hat up
behind the kitchen door. He turned with a scowl as his mother entered.
She looked even more ludicrous in the house than she had outside, with
her skirts tucked up to make spading the easier, so that there was
displayed an unseemly length of thick ankle rising solidly above the old
pair of men's side-boots that encased her feet. The battered hat perched
rakishly atop her knob of gray-white hair gave her a jaunty, sporting
look, as of a ponderous, burlesque Watteau.

She abandoned pretense. "Ernie, your pa'll be awful mad. You know the
way he carried on the last time."

"Let him. He aint worked five days himself this month." Then, at a
sudden sound from the front of the house, "He ain't home, is he?"

"That's the shade flapping."

Buzz turned toward the inside wooden stairway that led to t