Benefits Forgot | Page 5

them."
"O father, not that," cried Jason. "I'll apologize! I'll wear the pants!
Why, it would be Christmas before I'd see them again!"

"I can't accept your apology now. Neither your spirit nor mine is right.
And I cannot retract. Your punishment must stand."
Jason was all child now. "Mother," he cried, "don't let him! Don't let
him!"
Mrs. Wilkins' lips quivered. For a moment she could not speak. Then
with an inscrutable look into her husband's eyes she said:
"You must obey your father, Jason. You have been very wicked."
Jason put down his candle and sobbed. "I know it. But I'll be good. Let
me have my magazines. They're mine. I paid for them."
"No!" roared the minister. "Go to bed, sir, and see 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