THE SCOUT MASTER
377
the twitching at the corner of his mouth that he was finally about
to speak. When his lips parted and he simultaneously removed the
pipe I remarked the long distance between the point of his chin and
his eyes and noticed that the eyes themselves were set far apart and
were rather popped,
I
thought, from this upsidedown view.
Addressing Father as "Brother" - a thing he did only when
they were reminiscing-he began to speak of Uncle Louis. He lifted
his eyes to the ceiling, and from where
I
lay it seemed that he had
rolled his eyeballs far back into his head; and
I
noticed the strange
animal-like moisture of his upper lip. "Brother," he said,
"I
was play–
ing with Louis one day under the Mulberry tree at the end of the
side porch. We had a couple of pill boxes that old
Dr.
Pemberton
had given us and we had caught two of the caterpillars that fell from
the Mulberry tree. With some black thread from Mama's basket we
were hitching the poor fuzzy worms to the little boxes and then
filling the boxes with sand to see how heavy a load the caterpillars
could manage. But Louis quite accidentally pulled the thread so
tightly about the midd'e of one of them that he cut the little fellow
half in two. Then he looked at me silently across the two pieces of
worm. And, mind you, after several seconds he scrambled to his feet
and ran the length of the porch to where Mama was sitting with her
sewing in her lap.
"I
followed hot on his heels anJ stood by watching him as he fell
on his knees and hid his face in her sewing. Pretty soon when he
began to weep and shake all over - more like a girl than a boy -
Mama thought he had hurt himself on the scissor or a needle and
she jerked him up from her lap. He could not speak for his sobbing,
and when
I
had told Mama that he had only cut a little worm half
in two with a piece of thread, she drew him to her, smiling and pat–
ting his head tenderly. When at last he was able to speak he said,
"I
killed the little caterpillar, Mama, and he'll never, never come back
to life."
Uncle Jake was stirring
uncon~ciously
in
his chair as he spoke,
and I raLsed up from
his
lap and peered across the table cloth into
Father's face. His mouth literally hung open, and he said, "Why,
Jake, I've never heard you tell that before."
Uncle J ake replaced his pipe between his teeth and chewed on
it. He said, "Brother, I never had much heart for telling it, because
it happened the same summer he caught the fever." And in a few
minutes he got up and went over and unlocked the door to the porch
that nobody ever used. Before he went out Father called him in a
very stern voice, but he went out anyway and sat on the porch for a
