The Able Mclaughlins by Margaret Wilson — Read

John came out for a three months' vacation the next year and worked again for Wully. They had acres of sod corn that summer, and wheat to make a miser chuckle. Both men, and whatever neighborly passerby they might be able to hire, worked day after day till they staggered. To have stopped while yet there was sufficient daylight to distinguish another hill of corn would have been shirking; to go to supper while yet one could straighten up without a sharp pain in his back would have been laziness. Yet John was never too tired to choose an idiom as far removed as possible from the one he heard about him. Now that he had been in Chicago he had a growing contempt, which never failed to amuse Wully, for the speech of his own people. What was it they spoke, he demanded scornfully, swinging a violent hoe among the weeds. It was Scotch no longer. It wasn't English. It wasn't American, certainly. It was just a kind of -- he tried all summer to describe it satisfactorily in a word. Once he called it "the gruntings of the inarticulate forthright. " Mrs. Alex McNair was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed to like that woman, strange to say. Wully suspected he listened to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully's he was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully's and Chirstie's articulation he supervised continually, their grammar and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, "She won't can some," or "I used to could. " A less happy man than Wully might have resented correction from a younger brother. Wully took it gratefully, feeling he was getting not a poor substitute for the schooling he had been forced to miss. And when he saw his mother, he would repeat John's innovations to her with gusto. "Indeed! " she exclaimed upon one such occasion. "The gruntings of the inar -- what, Wully? Lawsie me! You did well to remember that! " "Yes," cried Wully. "But John didn't remember them, mother. He makes them up! " Chirstie would have been annoyed sometimes by John's attitude, if her son had not been so devoted to his uncle. Wee Johnnie refused to go to sleep in the evening till he had had his daily romp with John on the doorstep. And even if he did treat her like an unimportant younger sister, she had to like her baby's playmate.

The child was by this time the joyous little husky heart of the family. John had noticed him dutifully at first because he was Wully's, but he came speedily to love him for his own diverting charms. There had been an evening nearly two years ago, when he came into the little room where he and his sister cooked their meals, and had found her stretched out on the bed crying. He read the letter she gave him in explanation. His mother had written about the impending disgraceful baby. John hadn't forgotten his sensation of amazement, or the sharp wound that his disdainful sense of superiority sustained, but now he seldom recalled either. It outraged his sense of the fitness of things that he so well understood that scrape; that he had to wonder at times that passion was ever less rampant, less controlled, than in the case he had to consider. The information encouraged a budding cynicism within him. If it had been anyone but Wully -- even Allen -- he would have understood it better. He had read the letter, and stood looking at it. Then without a word he went out, and walked about the streets through the dusk. And never a mention of it passed between the brother and sister. And then when he came home, and saw Wully -- when that brotherly, honest geniality shone out simply towards him -- he couldn't think of that story. Wully's presence denied it, obliterated it. That was all. And wee Johnnie justified himself.