ve it to mother but laid
it in a pile on our kitchen table.

"About the house he went in the clothes covered with
the nasty orange colored paint. I can see the picture.
My mother, who was small and had red, sad-looking eyes,
would come into the house from a little shed at the
back. That's where she spent her time over the washtub
scrubbing people's dirty clothes. In she would come and
stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her apron
that was covered with soap-suds.

"'Don't touch it! Don't you dare touch that money,' my
brother roared, and then he himself took five or ten
dollars and went tramping off to the saloons. When he
had spent what he had taken he came back for more. He
never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about
until he had spent it all, a little at a time. Then he
went back to his job with the painting crew on the
railroad. After he had gone things began to arrive at
our house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there
would be a dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.

"Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother much more than
she did me, although he never said a kind word to
either of us and always raved up and down threatening
us if we dared so much as touch the money that
sometimes lay on the table three days.

"We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister
and prayed. I was a regular ass about saying prayers.
You should have heard me. When my father died I prayed
all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother was
in town drinking and going about buying the things for
us. In the evening after supper I knelt by the table
where the money lay and prayed for hours. When no one
was looking I stole a dollar or two and put it in my
pocket. That makes me laugh now but then it was
terrible. It was on my mind all the time. I got six
dollars a week from my job on the paper and always took
it straight home to mother. The few dollars I stole
from my brother's pile I spent on myself, you know, for
trifles, candy and cigarettes and such things.

"When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I
went over there. I borrowed some money from the man for
whom I worked and went on the train at night. It was
raining. In the asylum they treated me as though I were
a king.

"The men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was
a newspaper reporter. That made them afraid. There had
been some negligence, some carelessness, you see, when
father was ill. They thought perhaps I would wr