Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/188

 "Do you love your father?" asked Simon, seeking to fathom the blue eyes for the truth.

The blue eyes were, for the moment, intent upon a swarm of flies disporting themselves upon the window-pane.

"Do you love your father?" Simon asked again.

"No;" quoth Eliza, "I wish he was dead."

Now Simon Amberley was slow to anger; indeed it may be doubted whether he had ever in all his life before been thoroughly roused; and perhaps for that very reason, the surging flood of indignation, so new to his experience, seemed to him like a call from heaven. All day he fed his wrath on the deeds of Scripture warriors, reading aloud from the sacred records, till Patsy Linders exclaimed, enraptured, that "the Bible was a durned good book, by Jiminy!"

Little Eliza stayed on, as she often did after the school was dispersed, sure that "her Simon," would find some new and agreeable entertainment for her.

"Did your father ever hit you before?" Amberley asked casually, as they strung a handful of painter's-brush into a garland, which it was thought might prove becoming to Simon Jr.'s complexion.