and he was hurrying as fast as he could to

Rufus said, quietly, “He was coming home from Grampa’s last night, Grampa Follet. He’s very sick and Daddy had to go up way in the middle of the night to see him, and he was hurrying as fast as he could to get back home because he was so late. And there was a cotter pin worked loose.” “What’s a cotter pin?” “Shut up.” “A cotter pin is what holds things together underneath, that you steer with. It worked loose and fell out so that when one of the front wheels hit a loose rock it wrenched the wheel and he couldn’t steer and the auto ran down off the road with an awful bump and they saw where the wheel you steer with hit him right on the chin and he was instantly killed. He was thrown all the way out of the auto and it ran up an eight-foot emb—embackment and then it rolled back down and it was upside down beside him when they found him. There was not a mark on his body. Only a little tiny blue mark right on the end of the chin and another on his lip.” In the silence he could see the auto upside down with its wheels in the air and his father lying beside it with the little blue marks on his chin and on his lip. “Heck,” one of them said, “how can that kill anybody?” He felt a kind of sullen stirring among the others, and he felt that he was not believed, or that they did not think very well of his father for being killed so easily. “It was just exactly the way it just happened to hit him, Uncle Andrew says. He says it was just a chance in a million. It gave him a concush, con, concush—it did something to his brain that killed him.” “Just a chance in a million,” one of the older boys said gravely, and another gravely nodded. “A million trillion,” another said. “Knocked him crazy as a loon,” another cried, and with a waggling forefinger he made a rapid blubbery noise against his loose lower lip. “Shut yer Goddamn mouth,” an older boy said coldly. “Ain’t you got no sense at all?” “Way I heard it, ole Tin Lizzie just rolled right back on top of him whomp.”