Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/384

372 He crawled back into bed and wrapped himself as well as be could in the coverlet. An hour later, when his mother came in to look at him, he was throttling a damp pillow in his dreams, with a faintly mumbled "'S midnight—an' vengesmine!"

She did not know that this triumph was her own. She did not know that the elder Mickey had taken the first irrevocable step toward losing his son; that, thereafter, the boy was to be more and more her defense against her husband's good-natured but skulking shiftlessness and—as time went on—against the world that fought her down with poverty. She had learned only that the two Mickeys had been at the theater together and she stood looking down at him through the meager tears of an emotion that was very near despair. She touched him on the shoulder, with a weary gentleness. "Lay off yer clothes, Mickey," she said. "Yeh can't sleep so."

Something in his swollen eyes, as he opened them sleepily, reminded her of his father. She shook her head. "The two o' them," she said. "The two Mickeys!… Ah, child, have I put nothin' of mesilf into yeh? Nothin' at all?"