FROM THE LIFE
which seem to me to express him most completely. Furthermore, McPhee Harris had been associated with him for years, and Jack Arnett was a boyhood friend who knew him better, probably, than any one except his mother.
I have met his mother, but I have never had sufficient reportorial ruthlessness to ask her about him.
2
Arnett has given me one anecdote of Wickson's early days that I should consider vital to an understanding of him. "Wickson," he says, "left home as a boy, and came to town because he had been beaten by his father." The father he described as a petty tyrant who ruled his poverty-stricken family and his starved farm with all the exacting imperiousness of incompetency aggravated by indigestion. Arthur Wickson was an only child. He went one morning to his mother in the kitchen and blurted out to her that he had to leave home, that he couldn't stand it any longer. "I remember," he told Arnett, "how she was washing dishes, and when I told her she didn't say anything. She didn't even look at me. She was working in front of a window, and she just raised her eyes from the dish-pan and stood looking out of that window as if there were bars across it. I had the feeling that a convict must have when he tells his cellmate he has a chance to escape and can't take him along.
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