Motherless Babies 39 



nearer than anything else ever written to voicing 

 the speechless agony of his soul. 



"Till I lay with naught to hide me, 

 'Neath the Scorn of All Things Made." 



It must have been to save him from this sense 

 of blood guiltiness that his father had forbidden 

 all shooting in the breeding season. To do what 

 he had done was a crime that the good deeds of 

 a life-time would scarcely over balance or ex- 

 piate. A sense of the meanness and shame of 

 it grew as he buried the mother and the crushed 

 chick in the same little grave, dug by his naked 

 hands hands that seemed anxious to cover up 

 the stain of blood with the stain of earth. He 

 never looked up the colts; making that the object 

 of the expedition had been a lie, and this is what 

 it had brought him, a lasting stain on his very 

 soul. It was not the gun's fault, he thought, as 

 he shouldered it and started the longest way 

 around to reach home, trudging dully along, feel- 

 ing that its dead weight was a kind of an expia- 

 tion. It was long after dark when he reached 

 home, and hiding the gun in the granary, he crept 

 supperless up to bed. He undressed by fierce 

 flashes of lightning that kept nearly a continuous 

 blaze in the room, and they proved the precursor 

 of wind, rain, and hail that swept the earth and 

 also the shuddering soul of the small boy that 



