He thrust both hands into his pantaloons pockets, and strode moodily on.
“I say it’s a cursed shame!” he muttered. “I never did have any luck, that’s a fact. Just see how luck comes to some. With only a dollar or two in his pocket, this Joe got trusted for a first-class passage out here, while I had to come in the steerage. Then, again, he meets some fool, who sets him up in business. Nobody ever offered to set me up in business!” continued Hogan, feeling aggrieved at Fortune for her partiality. “Nobody even offered to give me a start in life. I have to work hard, and that’s all the good it does.”
The fact was that Hogan had not done a whole day’s work for years. But such men are very apt to deceive themselves and possibly he imagined himself a hard-working man.
“It’s disgusting to see the airs that boy puts on,” he continued to soliloquize. “It’s nothing but luck. He can’t help getting on, with everybody to help him. Why didn’t he let me sleep in his place to-night? It wouldn’t have cost him a cent.”
Then Hogan drifted off into calculations of how much money Joe was making by his business. He knew the prices charged for meals and that they afforded a large margin of profit.
The more he thought of it, the more impressed he was with the extent of Joe’s luck.
“The boy must be making his fortune,” he said to himself. “Why, he can’t help clearing from one to two hundred dollars a week—perhaps more. It’s a money-making business, there’s no doubt of it. Why couldn’t he take me in as partner? That would set me on my legs again, and in time I’d be rich. I’d make him sell out, and get the whole thing after awhile.”
So Hogan persuaded himself into the conviction that Joe ought to have accepted him as partner, though why this should be, since his only claim rested on his successful attempt to defraud him in New York, it would be difficult to conjecture.
Sauntering slowly along, Hogan had reached the corner of Pacific Street, then a dark and suspicious locality in the immediate neighborhood of a number of low public houses of bad reputation. The night was dark, for there was no moon.
Suddenly he felt himself seized in a tight grip, while a low, stern voice in his ear demanded: