I went no further. A woman was seated upon the bench—a fair woman, with hair like dull copper reflecting sullen fire, with a face and form perfect as those of the goddesses of old, a face which betokened an indomitable soul which knew the secret of the power wielded by the gods. She was bending over her clasped hands, her face was turned aside in an attitude of eager waiting, and wore a smile that transfigured it. Slowly approaching her, walking as a man walks in his sleep, came Robert Glen. He threw himself at her feet and laid his head upon her knee. She bent to him with a little rapturous caress, and both faces were as happy as those of the people in Paradise.
I turned and went away from the place, and entered its precincts no more. From that hour, I was self-devoted to one purpose—to seek the knowledge that should open the door to her degradation and destruction. In the midst of her success, and in the height of her pride, she should turn black as she was in the day when Lucas drove her. I swore it. So should my friend and my sister, whom she robbed and slew, be avenged.
OLD “HARD LUCK”
By E. Munson
Every one admitted he had a good heart in him. Even his bitterest enemy, Kid Alderson, was willing to make that concession, but qualified it by adding that he “was so blamed unlucky and peculiar, a body never knowed when he was in to clear.”
This singularity extended to his name. “H-o-s-s-e-l-k-u-s, accent on the sel,” he was wont to explain, with something like a shade of weariness, when a new operator faltered on his long patronymic.
Eben J. Hosselkus was engineer of Engine Seventeen-Forty-Three.
With the meagre data available, it is difficult to determine whether the name Hosselkus belongs to the Anglo-Saxon, Indo-European, or Teutonic family; but no such uncertainty attached to the origin of its unfortunate bearer. He was an unmistakable Yankee; rather below the medium height, lean and wiry; his mild, light-blue eyes were overshadowed by bushy and frowning eyebrows, and his grizzled mustache bristled with a singular ferocity, which the weakness of mouth and chin immediately belied. The whole man was decidedly contradictory. When first addressed, his manner was brusque and his voice gruff; but, after a few terrible expletives, his tone would soften and his most positive assertions invariably ended with an appeal for confirmation. “Now ain’t it so, for a fact? Now wouldn’t you say so, ’f you’uz me?” he would ask, while his wistful eyes wandered from face to face in search of support or sympathy, perhaps.
He was the oldest engineer on the division, and the most unfortunate. Two decades of brakemen and conductors had twisted and distorted his luckless surname in every conceivable way; but to all appellations, from “Old Hoss” to “Hustle-Cuss,” he ever accorded the same ready response.
Of late years he had been known simply as “Hard Luck.” When a train-crew would reach the end of the division, wan and famished from a protracted sojourn at some desert-siding, the first inquiry of their sympathetic brethren would be: “Who was pullin’ you?” “Old Hard Luck, of course,” was the seldom varied reply.