Short Stories
and deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy
debauch. Ten cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being ac-
customed to the carrying of money, he lost the ten cents. This oc-
curred at the time when he was suffering all the torments of con-
science, and it was to him an act of divine retribution. He had a
frightened sense of 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 event as the one
great criminal deed of his life, and at the recollection his con-
science always awoke and gave him another twinge. It was the
one skeleton in his closet. Also, being so made and circum-
stanced, he looked back upon the deed with regret. He was dis-
satisfied 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 spend-
ing 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 con-
crete 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 day-
light when he was wide awake. It came at night, in bed, at the
moment that his consciousness was sinking down and losing it-
self 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
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