tired that he could have lain down in the streaming gutter in peace; the whole thing seemed suddenly to lose all its quality of the extraordinary. In his weariness it seemed quite a usual experience that a man should be searching the Town for a wife who had run away with the preacher. It was as if the thing hadn't happened to himself, but as if he saw it from a great distance, or had heard it told him as a story. To-morrow (he thought), or the next day, they would be telling it everywhere in the Town, in every cigar-store and poolroom, about the stove at McTavish's undertaking parlors. They would hear of it even in Hennessey's saloon. All at once a sudden flash of memory returned to him—of Hennessey standing above him, saying, "Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back to Hennessey's place, if she don't want him messed up too much to be a good missionary . . . I don't want to be mixed up with that hell-cat."
In that queer mood of slackness, he was certain now of only one thing—that he could stay no longer in the same Town where Naomi and the Reverend Castor had lived, where Giulia Rizzo had been killed, where that pathetic uprising of workmen asking justice had been beaten down. He couldn't stay any longer in the same place with his own father. He wanted to go away, to the other side of the earth. Any place, even the savage, naked jungle at Megambo was less cruel than this black and monstrous Town.
At the slate-colored house he hammered on the door for twenty minutes without getting any answer, and at last he went to the side of the house and tossed stones against the window behind which his mother
