Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

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The people who owned the farm-steading came to peep and look. In a near field the farmer stood, rake upheld, transfixed, watching that march. From the door of the farm the old mother peeped. At the stable door there were faces. It was terrible. My father walked to and fro with his jaws locked and grim and his hands clenched. My mother ran after him clutching his shoulder and saying:

"John! John! Let your wife console you."

He turned once or twice in his walk and looked at her, but with no expression save a kind of puzzled one, as if he thought: "Who is this? Why does she hang on my steps?"

Once I thought he was going to strike her and leapt forward to intercept; but it was only a gesture of dismissing her that he had made; and as I leapt forward he looked at me, and his eyes were so blank—looking at me as if I were a stock or stone—that I gave a choking blub in my chest.

Suddenly my father cried out:

"And he was a man, Oh, God! He was a man!" and raised his fist to the heaven—and fell down in the yard.