The Wheel O' Fortune

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Charles
Kirschner, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Author of The Wings of the Morning, The Pillar of Light, The Captain of the Kansas etc.
By the Prophet! he exclaimed, I am overjoyed at seeing you
I don't want your charity, I want work!
Let your prisoner go, Mr. King
Good morning, Mr. King, she cried
You need no promise from me, Miss Fenshawe
The Arab appraised Royson with critical eye
He did not dare meet the glance suddenly turned upon him
Go, Dick, but come back to me in safety
At ten o'clock on a morning in October—a dazzling, sunlit morning after hours of wind-lashed rain—a young man hurried out of Victoria Station and dodged the traffic and the mud-pools on his way towards Victoria Street. Suddenly he was brought to a stand by an unusual spectacle. A procession of the unemployed was sauntering out of Vauxhall Bridge Road into the more important street. Being men of leisure, the processionists moved slowly. The more alert pedestrian who had just emerged from the station did not grumble at the delay—he even turned it to advantage by rolling and lighting a cigarette. The ragged regiment filed past, a soiled, frayed, hopeless-looking gang. Three hundred men had gathered on the south side of the river, and were marching to join other contingents on the Thames Embankment, whence some thousands of them would be shepherded by policemen up Northumberland Avenue, across Trafalgar Square, and so, by way of Lower Regent Street and Piccadilly, to Hyde Park, where they would hoarsely cheer every demagogue who blamed the Government for their miseries.