A feeling of horror crept over my body.  This was more than I had counted on.. my father, helpless on his back and his wits off gathering wool....

“Father!” I put my hand on a talon of his.

He turned his head slightly.  Smiled vacuously.

“Father!”

A perturbation clouded his eyes ... that painful struggle toward comprehension observed in an infant’s face.

“Who are you?  What do you want?”

“I’m your son—­Johnnie!... and I’ve come back to take care of you.”

“Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship.”

And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled him, and he wished to dismiss it.  Then, in a moment, he whirled about, changed and furious.  He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....

“You are an impostor ... you are not my son ...  I tell you again, he is away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ... perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor.”

He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.

“Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?”

As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me—­and he was quite strong, for all his emaciation—­the horror of my situation made me sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ... “that is the only thing you and this man have in common ... oyster-fries,” remarked my mind to me.  All the while I was pinning his wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while, I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ... “a dead rat somewhere, maybe,” suggested my father.

When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat’s foot stood up ... out of that can.

We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.

This was the ridiculous incident that possessed my imagination while I struggled with my father.

* * * * *

I had my father over on the bed.  He fought to a sitting posture again ... got his finger in my eye and made me see a whorl of dancing sparks.  With irritation and a curse ... then both laughing hysterically and sobbing ...  I bore him back to his pillow....

The strength had gone entirely out of him ... now it came into his mind that I was there trying to rob or kill him.

“Spare me, spare me!” he pleaded, “you can have everything in the house ... only don’t kill me!  My God!”

“Good Christ!” I groaned, as he beat upward, fighting again.