derstand, though I was too faint and miserable to go into
explanations. When she took off my night-shirt, she found such bruises
on my chest and shoulders that she began to cry. She spent the whole
morning bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me with arnica. I heard
Antonia sobbing outside my door, but I asked grandmother to send her
away. I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost as
much as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this disgustingness.
Grandmother kept saying how thankful we ought to be that I had been
there instead of Antonia. But I lay with my disfigured face to the wall
and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that grandmother
should keep everyone away from me. If the story once got abroad, I would
never hear the last of it. I could well imagine what the old men down at
the drugstore would do with such a theme.

While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable, grandfather went
to the depot and learned that Wick Cutter had come home on the night
express from the east, and had left again on the six o'clock train
for Denver that morning. The agent said his face was striped with
court-plaster, and he carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so
used up, that the agent asked him what had happened to him since ten
o'clock the night before; whereat Cutter began to swear at him and said
he would have him discharged for incivility.

That afternoon, while I was asleep, Antonia took grandmother with her,
and went over to the Cutters' to pack her trunk. They found the place
locked up, and they had to break the window to get into Antonia's
bedroom. There everything was in shocking disorder. Her clothes had
been taken out of her closet, thrown into the middle of the room, and
trampled and torn. My own garments had been treated so badly that I
never saw them again; grandmother burned them in the Cutters' kitchen
range.

While Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order,
to leave it, the front doorbell rang violently. There stood Mrs.
Cutter--locked out, for she had no key to the new lock--her head
trembling with rage. 'I advised her to control herself, or she would
have a stroke,' grandmother said afterward.

Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down
in the parlour while she related to her just what had occurred the night
before. Antonia was frightened, and was going home to stay for a while,
she told Mrs. Cutter; it would