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Tbe Runaway
In the lumberyard by the lake there was an old brick building two
storeys high and all around the foundations were heaped great piles
of soft sawdust, softer than the thick moss in the woods. There
were many of these golden mounds of dust covering that part of
the yard right down to the blue lake. That afternoon all the fellows
followed Michael up the ladder to the roof of the old building and
they sat with their legs hanging over the edge looking out at the
whitecaps on the water. Michael was younger than some of them
but he was much bigger, his legs were long, his huge hands dangled
awkwardly at his sides and his thick black hair curled up all over
his head. 'I'll stump you all to jump down,' he said suddenly, and
without thinking about it, he shoved himself off the roof and fell
on the sawdust where he lay rolling around and laughing.
'You're all stumped,' he shouted, 'You're all yellow,' he said,
coaxing them to follow him. Still laughing, he watched them look-
ing down from the roof, white-faced and hesitant, and then one by
one they jumped and got up grinning with relief.
In the hot afternoon sunlight they all lay on the sawdust pile
telling jokes till at last one of the fellows said, 'Come on up on the
old roof again and jump down.' There wasn't much enthusiasm
among them, but they all went up to the roof again and began to
jump off in a determined, desperate way till only Michael was left
and the others were all down below grinning up at him and calling,
'Come on, Mike. What's the matter with you?' Michael longed to
jump down there and be with them, but he remained on the edge
of the roof, wetting his lips, with a silly grin on his face, wondering
why it had not seemed such a long drop the first time. For a while
they thought he was only kidding them, then they saw him clench-
ing his fists. He was trying to count to ten and then jump, and
when that failed, he tried to take a long breath and close his eyes.
In a while the fellows began to jeer at him; they were tired of
waiting and it was getting on to dinner-time. 'Come on, you're
The Runaway
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yellow, do you think we're going to sit here all night?' they began
to shout, and when he did not move they began to get up and walk
away, still jeering. 'Who did this in the first place? What's the mat-
ter with you guys?' he shouted.
But for a long time he remained on the edge of the roof, staring
unhappily and steadily at the ground. He remained all alone for
nearly an hour while the sun like a great orange ball getting bigger
and bigger rolled slowly over the gray line beyond the lake. His
clothes were wet from nervous sweating. At last he closed his eyes,
slipped off the roof, fell heavily on the pile of sawdust and lay there
a long time. There were no sounds in the yard, the workmen had
gone home. As he lay there he wondered why he had been unable
to move; and then he got up slowly and walked home feeling
deeply ashamed and wanting to avoid everybody.
He was so late for dinner that his stepmother said to him sar-
castically, 'You're big enough by this time surely to be able to get
home in time for dinner. But if you won't come home, you'd better
try staying in tonight.' She was a well-built woman with a fair, soft
skin and a little touch of gray in her hair and an eternally patient
smile on her face. She was speaking now with a restrained, passion-
less severity, but Michael, with his dark face gloomy and sullen,
hardly heard her; he was still seeing the row of grinning faces down
below on the sawdust pile and hearing them jeer at him.
As he ate his cold dinner he was rolling his brown eyes fiercely
and sometimes shaking his big black head. His father, who was
sitting in the armchair by the window, a huge man with his hair
nearly all gone so that his smooth wide forehead rose in a beautiful
shining dome, kept looking at him steadily. When Michael had fin-
ished eating and had gone out to the veranda, his father followed,
sat down beside him, lit his pipe and said gently, 'What's bothering
you, son?'
'Nothing, Dad. There's nothing bothering me,' Michael said, but
he kept on staring out at the gray dust drifting off the road.
His father kept coaxing and whispering in a voice that was amaz-
ingly soft for such a big man. As he talked, his long fingers played
with the heavy gold watch fob on his vest. He was talking about
nothing in particular and yet by the tone of his voice he was ex-
pressing a marvellous deep friendliness that somehow seemed to
become a part of the twilight and then of the darkness. And
Michael began to like the sound of his father's voice, and soon he
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