f the closeness
of an awful and wrathful God. God had seen, and God had been swift to
punish, denying him even the full wages of sin.

In memory he always looked back upon that as the one great criminal deed
of his life, and at the recollection his conscience always awoke and
gave him another twinge. It was the one skeleton in his closet. Also,
being so made, and circumstanced, he looked back upon the deed with
regret. He was dissatisfied with the manner in which he had spent
the quarter. He could have invested it better, and, out of his later
knowledge of the quickness of God, he would have beaten God out by
spending the whole quarter at one fell swoop. In retrospect he spent the
quarter a thousand times, and each time to better advantage.

There was one other memory of the past, dim and faded, but stamped into
his soul everlasting by the savage feet of his father. It was more like
a nightmare than a remembered vision of a concrete thing--more like the
race-memory of man that makes him fall in his sleep and that goes back
to his arboreal ancestry.

This particular memory never came to Johnny in broad daylight when
he was wide awake. It came at night, in bed, at the moment that his
consciousness was sinking down and losing itself in sleep. It always
aroused him to frightened wakefulness, and for the moment, in the first
sickening start, it seemed to him that he lay crosswise on the foot of
the bed. In the bed were the vague forms of his father and mother. He
never saw what his father looked like. He had but one impression of his
father, and that was that he had savage and pitiless feet.

His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories.
All days were alike. Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand
years--or a minute. Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark
the march of time. Time did not march. It stood always still. It was
only the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere--in spite
of the fact that they moved faster.

When he was fourteen, he went to work on the starcher. It was a colossal
event. Something had at last happened that could be remembered beyond
a night's sleep or a week's pay-day. It marked an era. It was a machine
Olympiad, a thing to date from. "When I went to work on the starcher,"
or, "after," or "before I went to work on the starcher," were sentences
often on his lips.

He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the loom room and
tak