"Gee, that was tough on the man!" said Leon, "but I guess the law is all right. Of course he wouldn't want to die, and twice over at that, but I don't suppose the man he killed liked to die either. I think if you take a life, it's all right to give your own to pay for it."
"Leon," I said, "some time when you are fighting Absalom Saunders or Lou Wicks, just awful, if you hit them too hard on some tender spot and kill them, would you want to die to pay for it?"
"I wouldn't want to, but I guess I'd have to," said Leon. "That's the law, and it's as good a way to make it as any. But I'm not going to kill any one. I've studied my physiology hard to find all the spots that will kill. I never hit them behind the ear, or in the pit of the stomach; I just black their eyes, bloody their snoots, and swat them on the chin to finish off with."
"Well, suppose they don't study their physiologies like you do, and hit YOU in the wrong place, and kill you, would you want THEM hanged by the neck until they were dead, to pay for it?"
"I don't think I'd want anything if I were dead," he said. "I wonder how it feels to die. Now THAT man knew. I'd like to be hanged enough to find out how it goes, and then come back, and brag about it. I don't think it hurts much; I believe I'll try it."
So Leon took the rope Laddie lowered the baskets with, and threw it over a big limb. Then he rolled up a barrel and stood on it and put my sunbonnet on with the crown over his face, for a black cap, and made the rope into a slip noose over his head, and told me to stand back by the apple tree and hold the rope tight, until he said he was hanged enough. Then he stepped from the barrel. It jerked me toward him about a yard, as he came down smash! on his feet. I held with all my might, but he was too heavy—and falling that way. So he went to trying to fix some other plan, and I told him the sensible thing to do would be for him to hang me, because he'd be strong enough to hold me and I could tell him how it felt just as well. So we fixed me up like we had him, and when Leon got the rope stretched, he wrapped it twice around the apple tree so it wouldn't jerk him as it had me, and when he said "Ready," I stepped from the barrel. The last thing I heard was Leon telling me to say when I was hanged enough. I was so heavy, the rope stretched, and I went down until it almost tore off my head, and I couldn't get a single breath, so of course I didn't tell him, and I couldn't get on the barrel, and my tongue went out, and my chest swelled up, and my ears roared, and I kicked and struggled, and all the time I could hear Leon laughing, and shouting to keep it up, that I was dying fine; only he didn't know that I really was, and at last I didn't feel or know anything more.
When I came to, I was lying on the grass, while father was pumping my arms, and Laddie was pouring creek water on my face from his hat, and Leon was running around in circles, clear crazy. I heard father tell him he'd give him a scutching he'd remember to the day of his death; but inasmuch as I had told Leon to do it, I had to grab father and hold to him tight as I could, until I got breath enough to explain how it happened. Even then I wasn't sure what he was going to do.
After all that, when I tried to tell Leon how it felt, he just cried like a baby, and he wouldn't listen to a word, even when he'd wanted to know so badly. He said if I hadn't come back, he'd have gone to the barn and used the swing rope on himself, so it was a good thing I did, for one funeral would have cost enough, when we needed money so badly, not to mention how mother would have felt to have two of us go at once, like she had before. And anyway, it didn't amount to so awful much. It was pretty bad at first, but it didn't last long, and the next day my neck was only a little blue and stiff, and in three days it was all over, only a rough place where the rope grained the skin as I went down; but I never got to tell Leon how it felt; I just couldn't talk him into hearing, and it was quite interesting too; but still I easily saw why the man in the paper would object to dying twice, to pay for killing another man once.
When the apples were picked and the cabbage, beets, turnips, and potatoes were buried, some corn dried in the garret for new meal, pumpkins put in the cellar, the field corn all husked, and the butchering done, father said the work was in such fine shape, with Laddie to help, and there was so much more corn than he needed for us, and the price was so high, and the turkeys did so well, and everything, that he could pay back what mother helped him, and have quite a sum over.
It was Thanksgiving by that time, and all of Winfield's, Lucy's, Sally and Peter, and our boys came home. We had a big time, all but Shelley; it was too expensive for her to come so far for one day, but mother sent her a box with a whole turkey for herself and her friends; and cake, popcorn, nuts, and just everything that wasn't too drippy. Shelley wrote such lovely letters that mother saved them and after we had eaten as much dinner as we could, she read them before we left the table.
I had heard most of them, but I liked to listen again, because they sounded so happy. You could hear Shelley laugh on every page. She told about how Peter's cousin was waiting when the train stopped. They couldn't room together right away, but they were going to the first chance they had. Shelley felt badly because they were so far apart, but she was in a nice place, where she could go with other girls of the school until she learned the way. She told about her room and the woman she boarded with and what she had to eat; she wrote mother not to worry about clothes, because most of the others were from the country, or small towns, and getting ready to teach, and lots of them didn't have NEARLY as many or as pretty dresses as she did. She told about the big building, the classes, the professors, and of going to public recitals where some of the pupils who knew enough played; and she was working her fingers almost to the bone, so she could next year. She told of people she met, and how one of the teachers took a number of girls in his class to see a great picture gallery. She wrote pages about a young Chicago lawyer she met there, and only a few lines about the pictures, so father said as that was the best collection of art work in Chicago, it was easy enough to see that Shelley had been far more impressed with the man than she had been with the pictures. Mother said she didn't see how he could say a thing like that about the child. Of course she couldn't tell in a letter about hundreds of pictures, but it was easy enough to tell all about a man.
Father got sort of spunky at that, and he said it was mighty little that mattered most, that could be told about a Chicago lawyer; and mother had better caution Shelley to think more about her work, and write less of the man. Mother said that would stop the child's confidences completely and she'd think all the time about the man, and never mention him again, so she wouldn't know what WAS going on. She said she was glad Shelley had found pleasing, refined friends, and she'd encourage her all she could in cultivating them; but of course she'd caution her to be careful, and she'd tell her what the danger was, and after that Shelley wrote and wrote. Mother didn't always read the letters to us, but she answered every one she got that same night. Sometimes she pushed the pen so she jabbed the paper, and often she smiled or laughed softly.
I liked Thanksgiving. We always had a house full of company, and they didn't stay until we were tired of them, as they did at Christmas, and there was as much to eat; the only difference was that there were no presents. It wasn't nearly so much work to fix for one day as it was for a week; so it wasn't so hard on mother and Candace, and father didn't have to spend much money. We were wearing all our clothes from last fall that we could, and our coats from last winter to help out, but we didn't care. We had a lot of fun, and we wanted Sally and Shelley to have fine dresses, because they were in big cities where they needed them, and in due season, no doubt, we would have much more than they, because, as May figured it, there would be only a few of us by that time, so we could have more to spend. That looked sensible, and I thought it would be that way, too. We were talking it over coming from school one evening, and when we had settled it, we began to play "Dip and Fade." That was a game we made up from being at church, and fall and spring were the only times we could play it, because then the rains filled all the ditches beside the road where the dirt was plowed up to make the bed higher, and we had to have the water to dip in and fade over.
We played it like that, because it was as near as we could come to working out a song Isaac Thomas sang every time he got happy. He had a lot of children at home, and more who had died, from being half-fed and frozen, mother thought; and he was always talking about meeting the "pore innocents" in Heaven, and singing that one song. Every time he made exactly the same speech in meeting.