under him. "Crawl, you infernal whelp!
Lick the dust, confound you! Quick!" he commanded, growing each moment
more savage.

Mrs. Miner clung to his arm. "Please don't," she pleaded. "You're
killing him."

Morris did not look up. "Oh, no, I ain't. I'm giving him a little taste
of his own medicine." He flopped Miner over on his face and dragged him
around in the dust like an old sack. "Beg her pardon, or I'll thrash the
ground with yeh!"

"Please don't," pleaded the wife, using her whole strength to stop him
in his circuit with the almost insensible Miner.

"Beg!" he said again, "beg, or I'll cave your backbone in." There was a
terrible upward inflection in his voice now, a half-jocular tone that
was more terrible than the muffled snarl in which he had previously been
speaking.

"I beg! I beg!" cried Miner.

Morris released him, and he crawled to a sitting posture. Mrs. Miner
fell on her knees by his side, and began wiping the blood from his face.
She was breathless with sobbing and the children were screaming. The
tears streamed down her face, which was white and drawn into ghastly
wrinkles.

"You've killed him!" she gasped.

Morris put his hands in his pockets and looked down on them both, with a
curious feeling of having done something which he might repent of. He
felt in a way cut off from the satisfactory ending of the thing he had
planned.

"Oh, you've killed him!"

"Oh, no, I haven't. He's all right." He looked at them a moment longer
to see if there were any rage remaining in the face of the husband, and
then at the wife to discover her feeling concerning his action. Then he
looked back at the husband again, and apparently justified himself for
what he had done by the memory of the ineffable shame to which the wife
had been subjected.

"Now, if I hear another word of your abuse," he said, as he shook the
dust from his own clothes and prepared to go, "I'll give you another
that will make you think that this is all fooling. More than that," he
said, turning again, "I know something that will put you where the crows
won't eat you!--If I can be of any service to you, Mrs. Miner, at any
time while I'm here, I hope you'll let me know. Good-by."

Mrs. Miner did not reply, and when Morris reached the gate and looked
back she was still kneeling by the side of her husband, the sunlight
shining down upon her graceful head. Some way the problem had increased
in complexity. He felt a disgust of her weakness,