Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/17

 clenched his fist and shook it. "Gosh darn ye! What are ye, anyhow?"

Rising painfully, to the accompaniment of language he would not have wished his sons to hear, with mind engulfed in a fog of mist and amazement, Malachi gave up the intended visit to Kelley's and turned back toward his own house.

"Why, Pa! What's happened to you?" exclaimed Mrs. Judson in astonishment and alarm, as she viewed her husband's rueful countenance and mud-plastered body.

"Fell down!" said Malachi grumpily, and did not meet the gaze of his son, George, when that forgiving youth, all sympathy, rushed to his father's assistance and began currying him with that identical newspaper to whose perusal he had succeeded when the former flung it irately from him. A bathroom being an unknown luxury in the homes of such as Malachi in that period, the kitchen and the kitchen sink were given over to his purpose, while the boys quickened the fire in the cookstove to dry his clothes against the morrow.

Eventually the Judson family went to bed in average good humor with itself. But Malachi had a problem on his mind as he laid his stubbled cheek on the pillow.

"I wonder what the devil hit me?" he kept