why? The little boat glass-bottomed, so you could look down. She lifted up her skirts as she stepped down. Where now? A pair of pippins.
“Jim Bowles died while you were gone, I reckon,” said the motorman.
“What!” howled Gant. “Merciful God!” he clucked mournfully downward. “What did he die of?” he asked.
“Pneumonia,” said the motorman. “He was dead four days after he was took down.”
“Why, he was a big healthy man in the prime of life,” said Gant. “I was talking to him the day before I went away,” he lied, convincing himself permanently that this was true. “He looked as if he had never known a day’s sickness in his life.”
“He went home one Friday night with a chill,” said the motorman, “and the next Tuesday he was gone.”
There was a crescent humming on the rails. With his thick glove finger he pushed away a clearing in the window-coated ice scurf and looked smokily out on the raw red cut-bank. The other car appeared abruptly at the end of the cut and curved with a skreeking jerk into the switch.
“No, sir,” said the motorman, sliding back the door, “you never know who’ll go next. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Hit gits the big’uns first sometimes.”
He closed the door behind him and jerkily opened three notches of juice. The car ground briskly off like a wound toy.
In the prime of life, thought Gant. Myself like that some day. No, for others. Mother almost eighty-six. Eats like a horse, Augusta wrote. Must send her twenty dollars. Now in the cold clay, frozen. Keep till Spring. Rain, rot, rain. Who got the job? Brock or Saul Gudger? Bread out of my mouth. Do me to death—the stranger. Georgia marble, sandstone base, forty dollars.
"A gracious friend from us is gone, A voice we loved is fled, But faith and memory lead us on: He lives; he is not dead."
Four cents a letter. Little enough, God knows, for the work you do. My letters the best. Could have been a writer. Like to
