Mary tried to keep busy at some place where she could not hear his cries. But they pursued her from room to room.
Pelham wore his stockings to school,--they hid the old bruises, and the fresh welts. Night after night he cried himself to sleep. And the mother, stealing in to see the children safely in bed, would feel all the agony seared on her heart, at the sight of the tear-channeled boyish cheeks. She worried and brooded over the favorite son, until bluish depressions pouched beneath her eyes, and a hard look came into them as they followed her husband around his home tasks. He, in turn, became boisterously loud-spoken, and made a vast amount of noise stamping on the halls and porches. It was a gruesome three weeks for all.
At the end of this period, Pelham could stand it no longer. He kissed his mother good night, clinging around her neck and pressing passionate kisses upon her lips,--it would be the last time he would ever receive this parting kiss, he told himself. Then he knotted up, in an old sweater, his clean shirts and a change of underclothes, three handkerchiefs, his stamp album, and "Grimm's Fairy Stories," and hid them under the bed. To-morrow he would leave home forever.
While his mother was seeing to the breakfast table, he slipped into her room, his eyes still red from the morning's session with his father. He unlocked her drawer, and took out of her purse the three one dollar bills he found. On the red book, he knew, he was entitled to more than eight dollars, but this would do. He slipped in a note he had written the night before, and hid the bulging sweater in a rock beside the front path.
Walking to school with Nell, he pledged her to silence and then told her he was going to run away that afternoon.
"That's wicked, Pell." Her wide eyes were horror-filled.
"Would you let them whip you every day of your life?" He turned on her fiercely.
"To Jackson, or Columbus, or somewhere,--anything to get away from here. You'll look after my little chickies, won't you, sister?"
The girls were dismissed for lunch at twelve, and as Pelham had only half an hour, their mother usually met them at the big gate, and walked back to the house with them. Nell waited till Sue had run ahead, then betrayed the morning's confidence with maternal conscientiousness.
