steadily in the hot sun for an hour, growing more and more irritable because of the heat, the rank weedy stench of the graveyard, and his own deep antipathy to work. Eugene waited intensely for the attack he knew was coming.
“What are you standing there for?” screamed Big Brother at length, looking up in an agony of petulance. He struck sharply at the boy’s shin with a heavy wrench he held in his hand, knocking him to the ground, and crippling him for the moment. Immediately, he was palsied, not with remorse, but with fear that he had injured him badly and would be discovered.
“You’re not hurt, are you, buddy? You’re not hurt?” he began in a quivering voice, putting his unclean yellow hands upon Eugene. And he made the effort at reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering, blowing his foul breath upon his brother’s cringing flesh, and entreating him to say nothing of the occurrence when he went home. Eugene became violently nauseated: the stale odor of Steve’s body, the clammy and unhealthy sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch of his tainted flesh filled him with horror.
There still remained, however, in the cast and carriage of his head, in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined boyishness: women were sometimes attracted to him. It was his fortune, therefore, to secure Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the first summer she came to Dixieland. At night her rich laughter welled up from the dark porch, they walked through the quiet leafy streets, they went to Riverside together, walking beyond the lights of the carnival into the dark sandy paths by the river.
But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw the revulsion of the Gants against their brother, and as she began to see what damage she had already done to herself by her union with this braggart who had brandished her name through every poolroom in town as a tribute to his own power, she cast him off, quietly, implacably, tenderly. When she returned now, summer by summer, she met with her innocent and unwitting smile all of his obscene innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his bitter revelations behind her back. Her affection for Helen was genuine, but it was also, she felt, strategic and useful. The girl introduced her to handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant’s and Eliza’s for her, was really a partner in her intrigues,
