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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Quest of Lee Garrison," Max Brand crafts a riveting tale infused with the archetypal themes of adventure, identity, and the relentless pursuit of honor. Set against the backdrop of the American frontier, the narrative follows Lee Garrison as he navigates treacherous landscapes and moral dilemmas that challenge his very essence. Brand's prose is characterized by its vivid imagery and dynamic pacing, reflecting the influences of early 20th-century American literature and the Western genre's evolving conventions. Through sharp dialogue and intricate character development, Brand situates Garrison's quest as both a literal and metaphorical exploration of the self amidst a harsh and unforgiving world. Max Brand, a prominent figure in early American pulp fiction, is known for his ability to weave compelling narratives that encapsulate the rugged spirit of the West. Born Frederick Schiller Faust in 1892, Brand's extensive travels and experiences in the American Northwest profoundly informed his writing. His works, often celebrated for their psychological depth and rich characterizations, reveal the complex interplay between the individual and society, which is crucial in understanding Garrison's quest. For readers seeking a profound adventure story that delves beyond mere excitement, "The Quest of Lee Garrison" is a must-read. Brand's blend of action and introspection offers a rich tapestry that invites readers to reflect on the nature of bravery, sacrifice, and what it means to forge one's destiny. This novel not only entertains but also leaves a lasting imprint on the heart and mind of each reader. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Quest of Lee Garrison
Table of Contents
Introduction
One man's relentless search for meaning and justice drives him into the unforgiving distances of the frontier. In Max Brand's The Quest of Lee Garrison, the familiar elements of the Western are harnessed to a story of resolve, endurance, and the price of a promise. Brand, the pen name of Frederick Faust, wrote widely within the genre, and this novel aligns with his interest in stoic heroes tested by harsh country and difficult choices. Without revealing the turns of the trail, this introduction points to the book's tone and concerns, inviting readers to consider why such a journey still compels.
As a Western, the novel situates its action in the frontier-era American West, where vast ranges, spare towns, and shifting alliances shape every decision. Brand's Westerns appeared during the first half of the twentieth century, within the pulp-magazine tradition that favored swift narrative movement and clear stakes. The Quest of Lee Garrison belongs to that lineage, emphasizing physical risk, moral ambiguity, and the testing of character under open skies. While the exact publication particulars need not detain us here, the book reflects the period's appetite for brisk, character-driven storytelling that could articulate both the romance and the cost of the frontier.
At its outset, the narrative places Lee Garrison on a defined quest that pulls him beyond the safety of the known and into contested ground. The object of that quest gives the book its forward drive, sending him along trails where strangers may be allies, adversaries, or something harder to read. The journey requires choices under pressure, moments of restraint in the face of provocation, and the stamina to keep riding when certainty fails. Early encounters establish the atmosphere of risk and possibility, preparing readers for a story that prizes momentum without sacrificing interior stakes.
Brand's storytelling is associated with taut pacing, clear prose, and attention to how terrain shapes temperament, and The Quest of Lee Garrison reflects that approach. Scenes move quickly yet leave room for the quiet hesitations that precede decisive action. Dialogue tends to be spare and purposeful, revealing as much through what is withheld as what is said. Moments of violence are framed by the silence that follows them, giving weight to consequence rather than spectacle. The mood balances grit with a sober tenderness for flawed people trying to hold a code in a world that seldom grants certainty.
At the heart of the novel are questions that have animated Westerns since their inception: What, if anything, does honor demand when the law is distant or compromised? How do reputation and rumor shape a person's fate on the trail? The quest structure lets Brand explore the pull between personal vengeance and impersonal justice, and the constant negotiation between solitude and community. The land itself becomes an ethical field, testing endurance without regard for righteousness. Through Lee Garrison's choices, the book probes the costs of loyalty, the ambiguity of courage, and the possibility of redemption that never arrives as a certainty.
These concerns resonate beyond the saddle and the sage. Contemporary readers may recognize in Garrison's trek a version of the search for purpose under contradictory demands, the tension between institutional rules and inner conviction, and the challenge of discerning trustworthy companions in a world of mixed motives. The novel's insistence on consequence, patience, and earned trust counters the speed and noise of modern life, offering a meditative counterpart to its action. It raises durable questions about how character is formed under pressure, and what it means to choose mercy or restraint when force is available and tempting.
For those encountering Max Brand for the first time, The Quest of Lee Garrison offers an accessible point of entry into a classic tradition, combining momentum with moral gravity. Readers already familiar with Brand's range may find the hallmarks they value: a capable yet searching protagonist, a landscape that acts upon human will, and a plot that keeps its promises without easy answers. The result is a Western that feels both archetypal and alive, a ride that rewards attention to both the dust cloud and the tracks it leaves. The trail begins simply; its meaning deepens with every mile.
Synopsis
Lee Garrison begins as a quiet, capable young man whose past carries unanswered questions. When a fragment of information surfaces about a vanished figure tied to his early life, he leaves familiar ground to follow it across the frontier. The opening traces his decision from rumor to resolve, sketching the harsh distances and wary towns he must cross. His quest is not driven by fame or vengeance but by a need to set facts straight. The tone is restrained and direct, presenting the journey as a straight line outward into unfamiliar country where every stranger may guard a clue.
Early stages of the search take Garrison into a settlement where the name he seeks provokes guarded looks. He encounters a social order held together by fear of old grudges and new ambitions. A first brush with violence is narrowly avoided when he refuses to be drawn into a display of gun skill. Instead, he listens. Rumors suggest a trail that runs through ranchland and mining country, and point toward an elusive man with a formidable reputation. The narrative stresses Garrison’s patience and the way small, practical details—brands, payrolls, and travel times—begin shaping a map of possibilities.
As Garrison moves on, he finds reluctant help. A weathered cowhand, once connected with the past he is tracking, shares hints rather than answers. A woman whose livelihood depends on the town’s fragile peace warns him about stirring up trouble, yet quietly passes on a vital lead. These interactions sketch a community more complex than lawless legend, with alliances that shift around money and survival. Garrison’s methods remain steady: avoid loud threats, watch closely, and ask questions others overlook. With each conversation, the outline of his quarry becomes less like a villain’s silhouette and more like a human puzzle.
Clues carry Garrison along a route of abandoned camps, disputed grazing, and sudden prosperity in unlikely hands. Patterns emerge: small thefts timed to larger crimes, riders who appear before trouble and vanish after it, and a trail of debts that cannot be repaid. He tests stories against the terrain—how long a ride would take, where water can be found, what a storm would erase. The narrative emphasizes his learning curve as he adapts to local codes. He also senses a broader force manipulating events, suggesting that the person he seeks intersects with a power greater than one name.
A turning point comes when Garrison is drawn into a setup that could brand him as an outlaw. The trap is indirect, using rumor to gather him to the wrong place at the wrong time. Forced to ride hard and disappear, he learns how quickly suspicion replaces fact on the frontier. This section reframes his quest: he now hunts both a single answer and the source of the falsehoods shadowing him. The stakes rise from personal truth to survival and reputation. Pursuit tightens behind him even as the true trail ahead sharpens, marked by the same hand that framed him.
While hiding in open country, Garrison takes on work that lets him move without attracting notice. He proves reliable under pressure and careful with a gun, preferring restraint to display. His competence draws a few cautious allies, people who value steadiness more than threats. Through them, he glimpses the network of influence that governs both law and outlaw. The narrative underscores a growing resolve: his search will not end with a single meeting, because the name he follows is bound to a chain of decisions affecting many. The frontier’s code of self-help begins to intersect with a larger justice.
When Garrison closes on his quarry, the approach is cautious. He chooses a narrow canyon and the open light of a street with equal care, weighing who watches and who waits. A quiet exchange opens the door to larger revelations about motives, debts, and the cost of legends. The figure he has chased is not simply hidden but entangled in obligations that distort every simple version of the past. Without resolving the final outcome, this sequence pivots the story from pursuit to understanding. Garrison sees how truth can be both burden and release, and how speaking it reorders loyalties.
Pressure thickens as townspeople pick sides, and a powerful adversary moves to end the matter quickly. Garrison must keep his purpose clear while others demand spectacle or vengeance. A confrontation follows that tests both nerve and judgment, and depends as much on timing and witness as on aim. The scene avoids grandstanding; it is shaped by what must be proved, and to whom. The aftermath begins to untangle the false narratives that led to violence, while stopping short of detailed resolution. The book emphasizes consequences—legal, personal, and communal—over glory, marking a transition from chase to settlement.
In closing, the narrative shows Garrison measuring what his quest has cost and what it changes. The answers he sought bring a tempered peace, not triumph, and suggest a future grounded in clarity rather than myth. The frontier remains difficult, but the lines between law and will are a little sharper. The story’s central message is steady: truth pursued with patience can alter a rough world, though not without risk or compromise. By ending on earned calm rather than spectacle, the book affirms character over reputation and leaves Garrison prepared for a life defined by what he knows, not by what others say.
Historical Context
Set in the post–Civil War American West, The Quest of Lee Garrison unfolds against the shifting frontier of the 1870s–1890s, when cattle trails, railheads, and contested open range defined daily life. This was a landscape of transient towns like Abilene and Dodge City in Kansas, staging points between the southern plains and northern markets. The period saw rapid technological and demographic change—barbed wire, steam rail, and homesteader settlement compressing older patterns of movement. Ethnic and linguistic borderlands—Anglo, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities—overlapped with territorial jurisdictions still being formalized. The novel’s itinerant paths and sparsely governed spaces mirror this unstable geography of opportunity, risk, and provisional law.
The cattle-drive era dominated the Great Plains after 1866, when Texas longhorns were trailed north to railheads for shipment east. The Chisholm Trail (circa 1867–1884) and related routes sent an estimated 5 million cattle and 1 million horses from Texas to Kansas depots like Abilene and Dodge City. Herding required seasonal crews, remuda horses, and chuck wagons, and paid cowhands roughly $25–$40 per month. The drives knit together a market spanning ranches, railroads, and Chicago packinghouses. The novel’s roaming protagonist and frontier workscapes echo these circuits of labor and capital, where mobility, horsemanship, and reputational credit function as social currency.
Railroad expansion reconfigured distance and power in the West. The transcontinental line was completed on 10 May 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, under the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe reached Dodge City by 1872 and pressed through Raton Pass into New Mexico by 1878–1880, while the Kansas Pacific and other lines opened new railheads and freight corridors. Rails created boomtowns, synchronized markets, and attracted corporate muscle. The book’s passage through rail-linked towns reflects this compressing of space and time, where speed and communication alter the balance between itinerant riders, ranch syndicates, and the formal arm of the law.
The barbed-wire revolution and subsequent range wars transformed land use. Joseph Glidden’s 1874 patent enabled cheap fencing, ending the open range by the mid-1880s. Conflict climaxed in Wyoming’s Johnson County War (April 1892), when cattle magnates in the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired armed men to attack alleged rustlers. After the murder of small rancher Nate Champion at the KC Ranch on 9 April 1892, the invaders were besieged at the TA Ranch until federal troops from Fort McKinney, requested by Acting Governor Amos Barber and authorized by President Benjamin Harrison, intervened. The novel’s tensions between riders, foremen, and powerful interests resonate with this struggle over access, branding, and who controlled the grass.
Indigenous dispossession framed the era’s expansion. The Red River War (1874–1875) subdued Comanche and Kiowa resistance on the southern plains; the Great Sioux War (1876–1877), sparked by the Black Hills gold rush, culminated in Little Bighorn (25 June 1876) and intensified U.S. campaigns. The Dawes Act (1887) imposed allotment, shrinking Native landholdings from roughly 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million by 1934, and Wounded Knee (29 December 1890) left 250–300 Lakota dead. The book’s open spaces and tenuous claims sit atop this history, its silences and frontier anxieties mirroring the erasures and forced relocations that made ranching and homesteading possible.
Law, vigilantism, and professionalized pursuit evolved together. U.S. Marshals operating from Fort Smith under Judge Isaac C. Parker (1875–1896) pursued fugitives into Indian Territory; Texas Rangers, reorganized in 1874 into the Frontier Battalion, patrolled the borderlands; and private agencies like the Pinkertons served railroads. Famous episodes—the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Tombstone, 26 October 1881) and Pat Garrett’s killing of Billy the Kid (Fort Sumner, 14 July 1881)—crystallized debates over due process and personal justice. The novel’s chases, oaths, and showdowns reflect this legal pluralism, where badges, posse comitatus, and extralegal codes competed to define authority.
Environmental shocks and financial cycles reshaped the cattle kingdom. The catastrophic winter of 1886–1887—the “Big Die-Up”—followed summer droughts with blizzards and subzero cold, killing as much as 50–90 percent of herds in parts of the northern plains. Carcasses piled along drift fences, and many open-range companies failed. British and Eastern investment retreated, while fencing and smaller, winter-feed-based operations rose. The Panic of 1893, driven by railroad overbuilding and credit contraction, deepened price collapses and unemployment. The novel’s routes through foreclosed spreads, hiring fairs, and risk-laden trails echo this volatility, where a skilled rider could become a drifter overnight and honor hinged on keeping one’s word amid scarcity.
As a social critique, the book dramatizes the unequal bargaining power that accompanied consolidation of land, law, and capital. It exposes how corporate ranches and syndicates leveraged rail connections, political influence, and private gunmen to define “theft” and “order,” marginalizing smallholders and wage riders. The narrative registers the moral residue of conquest—Native dispossession and selective enforcement of law—while questioning the code of the gun as justice. Through Lee Garrison’s negotiations with bosses, sheriffs, and local cliques, the story indicts class divides, debt peonage, and reputational blacklisting, presenting the frontier not as egalitarian myth but as a contested polity where survival entailed navigating structural power.
The Quest of Lee Garrison
I. — THE FIRST ADVENTURE
Economy, whether of money or of labor, was carried by Mrs. E. Garrison to the nth degree, for economy of all kinds was necessary to the maintenance of her family. She had eight sons and no daughters. Three of the sons had been born at one time, and two at another. She threw herself with devotion into the battle to support these eight lives decently. A remnant of youth and good looks she sacrificed first, then all her time, her temper, her powers of body and soul went into the endless struggle, and she was so far victorious that neither Mrs. Oldham, right-hand neighbor, nor Mrs. Taylor on her left could ever find spot or speck on the new-burnished faces of the Garrison boys when they herded off to school in the morning. Work turned her to a famine-stricken wraith. But her heart grew stronger as she saw the fruit of her agony, eight boys with straight bodies and fresh, clear eyes.
On this wash Monday[1], having hung out the sheets and the pillowcases, the napkins, and the tablecloths, and all the whites, she dragged the clothes basket back to the kitchen to start the colored articles boiling in the same water that had served for the first batch. Time was when she had changed the water for each set of clothes, but now that her shoulders cracked under the weight of the boiler she moved it as seldom as possible.
"Besides," as she said, "clear water ain't what cleans 'em—it's the boiling and the soap and the blessed elbow grease." Yet, on this day, having dumped the colored things into the boiler and opened the door of the stove to shovel in more coal, she discovered that the last live cinder was turning from red to black—the fire was out. It was a calamity, for already the afternoon wore on, and she must rush to finish the washing in time to cook supper. That was the only point on which her husband was adamant—meals had to be punctual. Then she thought of assistance, and remembered that her eldest son was home; the teacher of his class was ill, which accounted for the vacation.
"The great lummox," muttered Mrs. Garrison. "He ought to have been down here hours ago, helpin' me hang out and rinsin'." She went to the foot of the backstairs, narrow, unpainted, and dark, the one untidy place of the house.
"Oh, Lee!" she called. "Lee!"
From above, half whine, half growl: "Yes?"
"Come down this minute and chop me some kindling. The fire's out."
"Wait till I finish this page."
"I'll wait for nothing. You come hopping, young man."
She heard the clap of the book being shut, the sound of heavy footfalls overhead, and she went into the dining room for an instant's rest. It was a hot day in June, with just enough breeze to drag the smoke from the factories over the town, imperiling the washings that sparkled in a thousand back yards, and filling the air with a thick, sweet odor of soot. Mrs. Garrison relaxed in her husband's armchair in the coolest corner of the room and bent her head to think over the dishes for supper. She closed her eyes, too, and in a moment she was asleep, but she kept on working in her dream, heard the kindling dumped with a rattle on the kitchen floor, and dragged herself from the chair to open the dampers so that the fire roared and the water began to foam in the boiler.
In reality, Lee Garrison had not left his room. That noisy closing of the book, the thumping of his feet on the floor, all were a ruse. He had only sat forward in his chair and drummed with his heels. His thumb had kept the place, when he snapped the book shut, and now he opened it, still sitting on the edge of the chair, still bending to rise, while his eye swept through the rest of the adventure. For ten swarthy giants had just started into the path of Lancelot and barred his way to the perilous chapel with a voice of thunder. They scattered again as the good knight put forward his shield and drew his sword against such great odds as these, and Lee Garrison went with Lancelot into the chapel itself, where only one light burned and where the corpse lay "hylled in silk[2]." He did not change that cramped position, as if about to rise.
* * * * *
It was hours later when he heard the deep voice of his father downstairs, and his mother pouring out a protest. Then he laid aside his Malory with a sigh and stood up. Plainly he would never approach the height or the bulk of William Garrison, but he gave promise of the same broad shoulders, together with better proportions and, throughout, a fine workmanship of which there was little trace in either his father or mother. He was their first-born, coming in those days when the words "my wife" still were strange on the lips of William Garrison, and when the girl had not yet left all the life of Molly Doane behind her. They hunted reverently for a name, and at last chose Lee because his grandfather had fought at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, wearing the gray. They looked on Lee with a quiet worship. When the other babies flooded the house with noise and care, they had less time for him, but his place was never usurped. The terror, the pain, the joy were all new with him, and the first note could never be quite repeated. Besides, he was different in many ways.[1q] All were fine boys, and Paul and William, Jr., probably would be even more huge than their father. They already out-topped Lee, but he was the choicer mechanism, the rarer spirit. Sometimes his mother thought, inarticulately, that the bloom of their youth, their first great joy, their hopes and dreams, had all gone into the body and soul of Lee. The eyes of the seven were straight and clear and misty with good health, but the eyes of Lee held both a black shadow and a light that were his alone. Even when he had been a tiny fellow he seemed to be thinking more than he spoke, and she had had an odd feeling that he often judged her. Therefore, she both dreaded and loved him. He was not demonstrative, otherwise his father would have idolized him. For the rest, he was the laziest boy in Waybury, rumor said. Books had been his world for five years now, but, although his father and his mother often lectured him about this all-consuming passion, they secretly respected it and hoped for great things.
He turned over his situation calmly, for he had swept through so many crises in books that he had little enthusiasm left for the troubles of real life. His mother was accusing him bitterly. It would have meant a hard thrashing, if any of the other boys had been the culprit, but his father had always had a strange aversion for caning Lee, and now the worst he could expect would be imprisonment in a dark room without supper. That was the usual punishment, for he wisely never had let them know that it was almost as pleasant to dream in the dark as it was to read in the light.
"Lee!" called his father. On his way downstairs he heard his mother reiterate: "I just told him to chop some kindling. Then I sat down for a minute and somehow—I don't know just how it happened, but—"
"That'll do, Mother. The point is, supper ain't ready, and Lee's to blame. I got to eat, if I'm goin' to work, don't I?"
"Hush up, William. Do hush up, or Lucy Ganning'll hear, and it'll be all over the neighborhood in a jiffy." Lucy Ganning was a shrewd-eyed spinster, living across the street.
"Damn Lucy Ganning!" cried the father. "Come here, Lee!"
The kitchen was in deep shadow, and to Lee, coming down the stairs, it seemed as if his father towered to the ceiling. The soot of the forge was furrowed by perspiration; it was an ugly mask, rather than a face, the eyes looking out through holes rimmed with white. His father's great black hand crushed Lee's shoulder and lifted him from the floor.
"Now," said William Garrison, fighting to control himself, "tell me the straight of this."
"He slapped his book shut and made as if he was coming down," cried the mother. "I went and sat down.—"
Lee hunted swiftly for a convincing lie, and told the truth.
"I just stopped to finish the page, Dad, honest. And then a minute later you came home."
His mother laughed hysterically. "Will you listen to that? Look at the stove. It's cold, ain't it? It's been two hours long, that minute of Lee's."
"D'you think I'd lie? Dad, it wasn't hardly more'n a minute."
"Lee, how d'you dare say such things? And there he sat all day upstairs, never offering to help me, while I was breaking my back with that boiler, and--" Her voice shook; she became mute with self-pity and rage.
"So that's what you been doin'?" said William Garrison. Lee looked sharply at his father and for the first time in his life was really afraid. The big man spoke quietly, but he spoke through his teeth, and he seemed a stranger. Through the dining-room door Lee saw seven white faces—little Jerry and Peter, twins, were clasping each other in terror.
"You been up there with your books! Your mother was down here slaving. I was up to the forge with fire in my face!"
They were silent, looking at each other, until Lee saw that his father was trembling.
"William," whispered the mother, "William, what d'you aim to do?"
"Close that door!"
She stared at him a moment and then went silently and shut the door across the seven white faces. She came back and reached out her hand, but she did not touch her husband with it.
"William," she whispered again.
"I'm going to teach him."
She fumbled and caught the back of a chair.
"Don't look that way, Mother," broke out Lee. "I'm not afraid."
"Hush!" she cried, but William Garrison had balled both his great fists.
"You don't fear me, eh?" he said, grinding out the words. "Well, by heaven, you will fear me. D'you hear that? My own son don't fear me!" It was not the voice of his father so much as his mother's eyes that froze the blood of Lee. She kept looking into her husband's face, fascinated, and Lee began to feel that all this time she had known mysterious, terrible things about William Garrison and concealed them from the world.
"Come here!" The big hands clamped on Lee's shoulders and wrenched them about. "Listen to me. I been lettin' you go your own sweet way. That's ended. You're no good, and you're comin' to no good end. I'm goin' to make you or break you, and I'm goin' to do it now."
There was no doubt about it. It meant a thrashing, and Lee wondered if he would scream as the others screamed. The thought made him sick. He wanted to die before the test came.
"William," said his mother in that same terrifying whisper, "it wasn't much he done wrong." The big man only turned his head and looked at her, and his fingers worked deeper into the shoulders of Lee. "I'll get the switch," she said.
"Switch? Switch nothing!"
She was upon him with a cry, her hands clutching at the breast of her husband.
"William, you ain't goin' to touch him? You ain't in the right way for it. You—you'll—kill him. My baby!"
"Molly, you go sit down."
She wavered, and then dropped into a chair and hugged her face in her arms.
"Don't do it, Dad," said Lee. "Don't you see? She can't stand it."
His father blinked as though a fierce light had been flashed in his face.
"Good heaven!" groaned Willliam Garrison. "A coward, too!"
By one hand he still held Lee, and now he turned and strode out of the kitchen and down the back steps, dragging the boy. He threw back the cellar doors with a crash and went down with Lee carried in front by the scruff of the neck. Below it was almost night, and now that the dimness covered the face of his father, Lee, standing in the corner, felt the horror slip from him. He remembered that worried, gentle face that had leaned above him when he had had scarlet fever.
"Dad," he said, "I'm not afraid, but wait till tomorrow. It's worse on Mother than it is on me."
"The devil!" said William Garrison hoarsely, and he caught up a billet of wood from the floor. That voice told Lee plainly that he had to do with a stranger, an enemy. He looked about him, and in the corner stood the wooden sword that he had whittled when he first read the story of Excalibur. He caught it by the flimsy hilt.
"I give you warning," he said in a high, small voice, "I'm going to fight back."
"You are, eh? Come here!"
Out of the dark a hand reached at him, but he struck it away with the wooden sword. That first blow was the last; Excalibur snapped at the flimsy hilt. A great black form rushed on him. He was whirled about. A bruising, cutting blow whacked on his shoulders. Lee could have wept with joy, for the pain, instead of leaping out at his teeth in a shriek, traveled inward, a deep, silent hurt. There was only the sound of the blows, the harsh breathing of his father, the staggering impacts, and shooting, burning pains.
A pause with lifted hand. "Have you got enough?" gasped out William Garrison, and a great sense of unfairness rushed through Lee and made tears come in his eyes. He was not being punished; he was being fought as a grown man fights an equal, and all his fine boy's sense of fair play revolted. If he could have spoken, he would have defied the giant in the dark, but he dared not open his lips for fear of the sobs that made his throat ache.
"Have you got enough?" repeated William Garrison, thundering. Then: "I guess that'll do you for a while." He seemed to grow sober at a stride. "Son, I thought you was a coward—maybe I was wrong. You stay here and think it over—what you done and how you lied—I'm coming back later on."
Mr. Garrison disappeared up the steps, the cellar doors crashed shut, and the padlock snapped. At that Lee forgot his pain.
"He wouldn't trust me," he whispered to himself. "He wouldn't trust me. He locked me up like a dog that's been whipped."
Lee shook his fist in a silent fury of shame and hate, and then sat down to think. Vital, deep emotions did not last long in Lee. His edge had been taken by romance, his sensibilities blunted, but, as he heard the noise of supper preparations begin over his head, he was sure of one thing—he would not face his seven brothers in the morning and see their half-sheepish, half-mocking grins. He was like them, now—something to be beaten into obedience. Then there was a deep rumbling—his father's laugh.
He could not believe it, for a time. Then silverware jingled faintly. They sat at the table; they had forgotten.
"And I'll forget you!" said Lee in a burst of sorrow and choking shame. "I'll forget you all, forever!"
It was a simple matter to escape through the cellar window, which, of course, his father had forgotten, and it was equally easy to steal across the kitchen floor while Paul was telling a noisy anecdote about the school. His voice covered the sound of Lee's steps, but through the dining-room door Lee saw his mother's sad face, and he blessed her for it.
Once in the room that he shared with three of his brothers, he lighted the oil lamp and swiftly set about making up his bundle, for he knew exactly what should go into a bundle when one leaves home. He remembered what Billy had taken in The Adventures of a Young Miner and all the important things that the hero had forgotten. In five minutes his bundle was completed, and he was on his way downstairs.
He stopped at the foot of them to listen. If there had been one word for him, one syllable to show they missed him, he would have turned back, but they were all exclaiming about something he did not understand, and Lee went out into the night.
