Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 160: what you’re looking at

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

be 950 to have him discharged. He couldn’t be just an ordinary tramp, for he was not lazy, his clothes were clean and neat and he carefully washed his face and hands be- fore every meal. But she did tell her uncle. Stopping at the pump where he was filling a pail with water she whispered to him what she knew of the hired man. Selby hardly was within the house that noon before informing his sister “‘ That Al- lerman, he’s just a tramp!” “Who told you?” demanded the woman. ** Her; there.” “T saw them kick him off the train,” stammered Edna in confusion, for the hired man just then entered the house. He heard her, understood and flushed redder than his sun tan. Mrs. Gilpin’s face flamed with anger, but Edna was surprised at the direction her fury took. ‘Well, of all the dirty, lowdown trash, kicking a nice boy like Harry off the train just like he was a common tramp!” She flashed a spiteful glance at her daughter. “Tl bet it was that smart Aleck brake- man you're so crazy about!” She stormed through the meal at the outrage, not listening to Allerman’s stum- bling attempts to explain how he came to be “ beating his way,” assuring him she knew he was all right. She was so bitter against the trainmen that Edna did not attempt her customary rendezvous with Walter, though she was worried at not knowing whether he was aboard the freight. Thus the chore of go- ine after the cows fell to the grumbling Selby until one afternoon the hired man suggested to Mrs. Gilpin that he would do it if Edna would go along to show him which cattle to leave behind. The woman agreed, glad to see the two young people together. The girl did not know why Harry wanted her to accompany him. Perhaps it was just desire for her society, as from the first he had paid her a kind of diffident atten- tion. Perhaps it was out of pity to give her opportunity to see her sweetheart. As they idled homeward through the rag- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. weeds, Edna listening to the whistle of the freight train in the distance, the man re- marked that it was too bad her mother was so severe against the brakeman. They weren’t bad fellows, those railroad men. The freight appeared out of the hollow as he talked, and Edna looked in vain for Walter. When it was gone she noted Harry staring after it, a wistfulness in his eyes unaccountably like her own. For days and weeks whenever it was possible, she went beside the track of after- noons as the train rumbled by, but no trace of Walter rewarded her. Sometimes she went alone, her mother having forgot- ten about the brakeman, sometimes with Harry, and somehow she felt her disappoint- ment tempered as always she saw the hired man’s gaze bent upon the departing cars in sympathy with her grieving. TIT. MONTHS passed and Edna did not see or hear from Walter, and though she did not forget or cease to care for him, she came reluctantly to accept the conclusion that he had just been flirting with her and that she would never see him again. Else why had he not written, if he could not have come to her? The nice young hired man was quietly attentive, and she did not rebuff him. In- deed, she had liked him almost from the beginning and she suspected that if it had not been for Walter and her mother’s par- tisanship she might have felt affection for him. She was even fond of him in a calm, unemotional way just as she was fond of her mother, her uncle, and the sluggish cows she drove to the milking as the freight train rumbled by without her brakeman. Harry courted her persistently in his hesitating, matter-of-fact fashion, encour- aged by her passive acquiescence and Mrs. Gilpin’s open approval, for he was now in higher esteem than ever with his employer. She gave him the easiest jobs and the more responsible trusts while old Selby mum- bled and snarled about tramps and bums, fretting at prospect of this Harry lording it over him as boss in the time to come. The hired man talked little of himself Comiclooks.€©