Benefits Forgot | Page 5

to it that you pray for a better heart."
Jason's sobs sounded through the little house long after his father and mother had gone to bed. The minister sighed and turned restlessly.
"Why was I given such a rebellious son, do you suppose?" he asked finally.
"Perhaps God hopes it'll make you have a better understanding of children," replied Mrs. Wilkins. "Christ said that unless you became like one of them you could not enter the kingdom."
There was another silence with Jason's sobs growing fainter, then, "But he was wicked, Mary, and he deserved punishment."
"But not such a punishment. Of course, I had to support you, no matter what I thought. But O Ethan, Ethan, it's so easy to kill the fineness in a proud and sensitive heart like Jason's."
"Nevertheless," returned the minister, "when he spurns the giving hand of God, forgiveness is God's, not mine. We'll discuss it no more."
Nor was the matter discussed again. Jason appeared at breakfast, with dark rings about his eyes, after having done his chores, as usual. Once, it seemed to his mother that he looked at her with a gaze half wondering, half hurt, as if she had failed him when his trust and need had been greatest. But he said nothing and she hoped that her mind had suggested what was in her aching heart and that Jason's was only a child's hurt that would soon heal.
He never again asked for the magazines. On Christmas morning his father placed them, tattered and marred, from their many lendings, beside his plate. Jason did not take them when he left the table and later on his mother carried them up to his room. Whether he read them or not, she did not know. But she was glad to see him begin again to watch for the packet and read the current numbers as they arrived.
She dyed Billy Ames' striped pants in walnut juice and they really looked very well. Jason wore them without comment as he did the shirts she fashioned for him from many shirt tails.
And in the spring they left High Hill for a valley town.
[Illustration]

II
THE CIRCUIT RIDER

[Illustration]
II
THE CIRCUIT RIDER
The years sped on with unbelievable swiftness as they are very prone to do after the corner into the teens is turned.
Jason worked every summer, but he did not offer to buy his mother a dress nor did he buy himself either clothing or books. He put all he earned by toward his course in medicine. When he was a little fellow, his mother had given him a lacquered sewing box that had belonged to her French mother. It had proved an admirable treasure box for childish hoardings. Jason, the summer he was thirteen, cleared it out and put into it his summer earnings, ten dollars.
With his newly acquired reticence, he did not speak of the box, nor did he mention the extra bills, quarters and dollars that appeared there from time to time. The little hoard grew slowly, very slowly, in spite of these anonymous additions--it grew as slowly as the years sped rapidly, it seemed to Jason's mother.
Jason must have been sixteen, the summer he went with his father on one of the Sunday circuit trips. He never had been on one before. But it had been decided that he was to begin his medical studies in the fall. He was to be apprenticed to a doctor in Baltimore and his mother was anxious for father and son to draw together if possible before the son went into the world. Not that Jason and the minister quarreled. But there never had been the understanding between the two that except for the unfortunate magazine episode, always had existed between Jason and his mother.
The trip lay in the hills of West Virginia. Brother Wilkins rode his old horse, Charley, a handsome gray. Jason rode an old brown mare, borrowed from a parishioner for the trip.
Mrs. Wilkins, standing in the door, watched the two ride off together with a thrill of pride. Jason was almost as tall in the saddle as his father. He had shot up amazingly of late. The minister was getting very gray. He had been late in his thirties when he married. But he sat a horse as though bred to the saddle and Old Charley was a beauty. Brother Wilkins was very fond of horses and was a good judge of horse flesh. Sometimes Mrs. Wilkins had thought, that if Ethan had not chosen to be a Methodist minister he would have made a first-class country squire.
She watched the two out of sight down the valley road, then with a little sigh turned back to the empty home.
Jason, though always a little self-conscious when alone with his father, was delighted with the idea of the trip. They crossed the Ohio on the