Roxy Hastings — page 42: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ROXY HASTINGS. 83 his mind and went off in the night. We can’t account for him after that.” “But if he’s found ?” é “We must see that he isn’t. You know there’s places in that gully that—” | “But if he is found?” repeated the other, gruffly. “ Well there was another traveler, a suspicious looking fellow that stopped at my house late that night—slept in the next room to Lee, and went off before breakfast. He did it. Don’t you see?” “Ho! You’re acute one, Rooke, you are. ’Tain’t easy to get the start of you.” | Charley Lee tried in vain that night to get a chance to speak to Roxana in private. He wished to tell her all that he had done, and designed to do, and to press some money upon her acceptance to enable her to prepare for her ex- pected journey. But the morning would answer for these purposes, and he resolved to rise early, not doubting that she would find some way to give him an interview. He was surprised to find that his room was not the same which he had occupied on the previous night, and that it was a less comfortable one. But Rooke explained on light- ing him to bed that he expected another guest, for whom he had reserved the other apartment. This fiction of another lodger would be every way con- venient, and might reconcile the young man to his pecuni- ary losses in the morning, provided he escaped the greater evil which so seriously threatened him. It was told every where through the house that a traveler had called just before dark, a stout, black-bearded man, on a bay horse, to engage a room, which he would return to occupy at eleven o’clock or after, and that he rode off at a rapid gallop up the ridge road. There was much speculation as to who this mythical man was, but Charley took no interest inthe subject. He was only anxious to get off early in the morning to redeem his promises to his fair benefactor, and then to hasten home, and relieve the wants and allay the anxieties of his beloved relations there. | Full of these blissful thoughts, he retired to rest, and unsuspicious of danger, he was soon lost in sleep. Robbery and murder were crimes which seemed to him — to belong only to some barbarous age and nation, or per- haps occasionally to some far outpost of civilization in our own land. They were never bug bears to him, for his experience had never pointed to danger of that kind, Gomicbooks (elo)