We puffed at our pipes in silence for a little while; and one of the
dogs rose to lay his chin upon my knee. “I can’t help feeling sorry for
his father, too,” I said at last.
Chet nodded. “He was wrong all the time,” he replied. “But no one ever
regretted it more, when it was too late, and he saw what he had done to
Jim.” He was still for a moment, then wrote a swift “finis” to the tale.
“The last time I saw Jim,” he said, “was down on the wharf at East
Harbor. He was drunk that day, and his father and his brother Charley
were trying to get him home. Jim was a big man then; and when he was
drunk, he was strong as a bull. I remember he took Charley around the
waist and threw him right off the edge of the wharf into the mud flats,
and Charley landed on his face in them.
“His father tried to catch Jim’s arm, and Jim turned around and hit him
in the mouth and mashed his lips so they bled, and knocked him down.
“That seemed to sober Jim a little, and he sat down with his back
against a pile and cried; and his father got up and came and was
kneeling down with his arm around Jim; and he was crying, too. They were
both crying. And it may have been the drink in Jim; but the old man
hadn’t been drinking.
“That’s the last time I ever saw him. Crying there, with his father.
Probably they both saw, then, how bad things had gone.
“But it was too late for anything to change Jim. The next year, I think
it was, he died.”