But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie's sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom Chase.
Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any description--although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering a female child--and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.
Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart had held for his wife at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear his burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come when that threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt. She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her accumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.
Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. A man's wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.
It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.