Anything Once

He drank deeply, then struggled to a sitting posture, his face whitening beneath its tan.
ANYTHING ONCE
DOUGLAS GRANT
AUTHOR OF “THE SINGLE TRACK,” “BOOTY,”“THE FIFTH ACE,” ETC.
Frontispiece by PAUL STAHR
New York
W. J. Watt & Company
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
1ANYTHING ONCE
The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel’s itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel’s eyes were usually as sharp as the bargains he drove, but the dust must have obscured his vision. Otherwise he would have seen the man lying motionless beside the road, 2with his cap in the ditch and the pitiless sun of harvest-time caking the blood which had streamed from an ugly cut upon his temple.