Altogether, I have to admit that I was a thoroughly bad boy. About once a week Uncle Abner cornered me and gave me a hiding with his blacksnake whip. I used to fight back until he knocked me out. He was like my father - a giant of a man - and I still lacked a man’s hardened strength.
There were some pleasant times that had nothing to do with fighting. The best were the long winter evenings when Aunt Agnes taught me my lessons. She was a lean, withered woman with a long, skinny neck. Books used to fire her eye, and she managed to get me interested. I worked hard, partly because I felt that one way of getting free from Uncle Abner was to learn enough to fit myself for a better way of living. But I was never meant for a life indoors, and, even when the whole countryside was crusted over with snow, I found enough mischief outdoors to keep me busy.
In the spring of my sixteenth year I felt that I was close to manhood and decided to run away, and I did. Uncle Abner, however, had no mind to give up a strong hand who worked on worse food than a slave could exist on and who never had to be paid. He caught me ten miles from home. We had a grand fight while it lasted, but he finished me with a blow from the butt end of his big whip. Then he tied my hands behind my back, tethered me to the pommel of his saddle, and drove me home like a horse. Every few steps that whip sang behind me and cracked across my shoulders. It was as long a ten miles as I ever walked. But I set my teeth and made up my mind the next time I would get away and leave no trace.
That night I went to bed early, but on my heap of straw in the attic I couldn’t sleep. The whip cuts across my back were too sore. I lay there, turning and twisting, until I heard Aunt Agnes go to bed. Uncle Abner was busy repairing a broken yoke, and he was still up when someone knocked at the front door. It opened, and a gust of wind sneaked up into the attic through the open trap door. Then I heard Uncle Abner shout out: “Will!”
I heard a big voice answer: “Well, Abner, here I am!”
“Are they after you?” asked Uncle Abner.
“I suppose they are,” said the big voice. “I’m not here for long. Only stopped off to see how the boy is comin’ on.”
I knew it was my father. I knew he’d escaped from prison. And I was so excited that the cuts across my back stopped burning. I wriggled over on my stomach and looked down through the trap door, and I saw the biggest man I’ve ever laid eyes on, except Chuck Morris. He wasn’t actually any taller than Uncle Abner, and I don’t imagine that he weighed many pounds more, but bigness isn’t in pounds. He looked like a man chopped out of raw rock. He sat by the fire with his big, ugly head dropped on one fist, and that fist looked strong enough to knock down an ox.
TROUBLE IN THE SHACK
It was like seeing a ghost turned into flesh and blood. I’d heard so much about Will Dorset and heard him put into the past tense so often I’d almost forgotten that he was still alive. Only at Christmas time Aunt Agnes always made up a package and sent it to him. The rest of the year he was dead. Now that I saw him before me, I could understand everything that I had wondered at before - why he had killed three men out of the six before the last of the six had been able to down him - and why people in that part of the country always used to say of a powerful man: “As strong as Will Dorset.” He was the sort of man that one picks out of a thousand - or a million.
“Now where’s it to end?” asked Abner, standing up and looking down in a helpless way at my father.
“Get me some food,” commanded my father. “I haven’t had a bite for forty-eight hours.”
One could believe it, too, seeing the amount of cold pork and cornbread and milk that he swallowed while Uncle Abner told him how things were.
“I’ve been doing all that a man could do for any son of his own,” said Uncle Abner, “but your boy is turning out wild, Will. Mighty wild.”
“I’m glad of it,” said Father. “I hate a mealy-mouthed mama’s boy. I want a man for a son. Is he a man, Abner?”
“Watching him grow up and caring for him has made an old man out of me before my time, Will,” said Uncle Abner.
My father raised his head as he finished eating and gave Uncle Abner a queer look, which made me guess that Will Dorset was nobody’s fool. “You look able to stand up and take care of yourself,” he said. “How big has he grown?”
“Small,” said Uncle Abner.
“Small? That’s bad.”
“But tough, Will. Tough as hickory.”
“Well, that’s something. I’ll have a look at him after a time.”
“Are you taking him along with you?” asked Abner, very anxious.
“Not I.Take him along with me? The way I travel and the life I live from now on would kill a dog.. .even if I get away from them.”
“Are they close after you?”
“I don’t know. Two of them came up with me at Glendon. I knocked their heads together and came on.”
“Glendon! Then they’ll guess you’re heading for home. They’ll spread the news….”
My father frowned at him. “Those men are dead,” he said.
Uncle Abner coughed like a man half strangled. “Dead,” he echoed. “If you’re caught here, then….”
“The devil, man,” said Will Dorset. “Stop that talk. I know you, Abner, as well as you know me. Let’s tell the truth and listen to the devil groan.”
Uncle Abner bit his lip. “I have a horse you’d be welcome to, Will, if you want to start right on….”
“Horse? I know your horses. They wouldn’t stand up under my weight. It takes a mean man to make one of your horses walk a mile. I’ve used spurs on your cattle before, and I’d rather walk. Life isn’t that dear to me. It’s kind of you, Brother, but I’ll trust to my own legs. Now tell me how your luck has been. I’ve had few enough letters from you.”
“I’ve been working day and night like….”
“Don’t whine. I hate a whiner, you know. Well, let the letters go. What I want to know about is the money. I suppose you’ve used it?”
“I had to, Will. I had to. With another mouth to feed in this family….”
“Haven’t you been able to get any work out of the boy?”
“Quicker to do things myself,” said Uncle Abner. “A lot quicker. Maybe a harder man and a sterner man would have got work out of him, but I never could stop remembering he was your flesh and blood. I was too tender with him, and I started him in lazy habits, I’m afraid.”
“He’s been useless, then?”
“Worse’n that. Much worse.”
My father yawned. The wind cuffed the door and rattled it so that Abner Dorset jumped as though a voice had shouted at him. But my father gave the door not a glance.
“I think that’s a lie,” he said. “I know your tenderness. I remember it pretty well when I was a boy and a younger brother.”
“A lie,” said Abner with a dark look, “is a pretty dangerous thing to give, even to a brother.”
“Now you talk like yourself,” said my father, nodding. “You haven’t changed much. Well, the thousand dollars is gone, then?”
“Soaked up long ago… long ago. Agnes could know when we had to spend the last of it on clothes and shoes for your son. But I’ve forgot, it was so long ago.”
At that, I laid hold of the rags that clothed me and felt my rage and hate, bursting in my throat. But still I waited. I did not want to appear until a crisis came.
Uncle Abner seemed none too pleased by the talk about money. He hurried the conversation off in another direction. “But where do you aim to go, Will?”
“West,” said my father. “West, man, where old lives are forgotten and new lives are being lived. I’m going out where there’s elbow room. I was never meant for this crowded country”