he half-story
above. But his mother followed, with surprising agility for so heavy a
woman. She put a hand on his arm. "Such a good-payin' job, Ernie. An'
you said only yesterday you liked it. Somethin' must've happened."

There broke a grim little laugh from Buzz. "Believe _me_ something
happened good an' plenty." A little frightened look came into his eyes.
"I just had a run-in with young Hatton."

The red faded from her face and a grey-white mask seemed to slip down
over it. "You don't mean Hatton! Not Hatton's son. Ernie, you ain't
done--"

A dash of his street-corner bravado came back to him. "Aw, keep your
hair on, Ma. I didn't know it was young Hatton when I hit'm. An' anyway
nobody his age is gonna tell me where to get off at. Say, w'en a guy who
ain't twenty-three, hardly, and that never done a lick in his life
except go to college, the sissy, tries t'--"

But the first sentence only had penetrated her brain. She grappled with
it, dizzily. "Hit him! Ernie, you don't mean you hit him! Not Hatton's
son! Ernie!"

"Sure I did. You oughta seen his face." But there was very little
triumph or satisfaction in Buzz Werner's face or voice as he said it.
"Course, I didn't know it was him when I done it. I dunno would it have
made any difference if I had."

She seemed so old and so shrunken, in spite of her bulk, as she looked
up at him. The look in her eyes was so strained. The way her hand
brought her apron-corner up to her mouth, as though to stifle the fear
that shook her, was so groping, somehow, so uncertain, that,
paradoxically, the pitifulness of it reacted to make him savage.

When she quavered her next question, "What was he doin' in the mill?" he
turned toward the stairway again, flinging his answer over his shoulder.

"Learnin' the business, that's what. From the ground up, see?" He turned
at the first stair and leaned forward and down, one hand on the
door-jamb. "Well, believe me he don't use me as no ground-dirt. An' when
I'm takin' the screen off the big roll--see?--he comes up to me an'
says I'm handlin' it rough an' it's a delicate piece of mechanism.
'Who're you?' I says. 'Never mind who I am' he says, 'I'm working' on
this job,' he says, 'an' this is a paper mill you're workin' in,' he
says, 'not a boiler factory. Treat the machinery accordin', like a real
workman,' he says. The simp! I just stepped down off the platform of the
big press, and I says, 'Well, you look like a kinda delicate piece o