"I don't know," she judiciously reflected. Then with a sudden afterthought she added, "That might possibly do for a middle name. I have already decided upon the first."
I wonder what name she has in mind--and she had just finished telling me that I had a full half-interest in that kid!
A railroad now runs into Adamson County and the new order is replacing the old. My wife and I and our brother went down on the first train run over the new line. The people had gathered to see the spectacle, and incredible as it may seem, there were among them some who looked for the first time on a locomotive. Old Mrs. Marcus, a little more withered and monkey-like, was there, and as she contemplated the marvel she could only murmur in wonderment, "Well, Provi-_dence_!"
Calloway Marcus no longer rides in a hollow square, but goes openly to court to defend the railway's damage suits. Yet now that the law is becoming adequate, he will never have the opportunity to turn it, as his weapon of reprisal, against Jim Garvin. Retribution came to the head of the murder syndicate with grimmer and more appropriate drama than Marcus had planned. The judge fell behind his own counter, riddled with bullets bought from his own shelf, and fired by the hand of his own chief henchman and jackal.
Though one of the last of the terrorized juries sat in the box, to the end that the slayer "came cl'ar," it is now Curt Dawson who goes sunken-eyed and body-guarded, searching the shadows. Shots from the laurel are few--but occasional even now--and Garvin's boy is nearing manhood. At all events, Garvin's executioner seems convinced that reprisal will come to him. Perhaps it is a premonition.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Portal of Dreams, by Charles Neville Buck