Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine, Vol. 107 No. 3 — page 37: what you’re looking at

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

Charles JILDRETH raised his eyes from the H black wallet on the floor to the girl. She had not Stirred as the man by her side on the car seat, after one swift, cunning look over his shoulder, arose and thrust his way through the crowd in the aisle to the front exit. Hildreth had not yet seen her face turned to the fogged window and the rainy night, merely a profile, proud, clear-cut, but wearied to utter dejection; and the nervous little gesture of her gloved hand raised to put back the veil above her ear. He felt that she did not belong here on this steam- ing, crowded street-car in the rush hour, among the parcels and dank raincoats of the straphangers, and her mood caught his own despondent fancy. He himself was wet from the autumn storm, and he saw the sparkle of water on her brown hair and the black jet of her hat; and when he leaned to pick up the black packet, which she had most evidently dropped, her sleeve brushed his cheek, and it was soaked and heavy. } “Qut of the storm, too,” he mused. ‘Rotten luck for anybody.” His fingers were on the thing behind her feet when he realized she had arisen as if with a sudden resolution to be off any- where, away from the dreary crowd. But when he arose, also, to restore the packet with a murmured apology, a basket-laden woman sank mto the vacant seat, and he merely caught a glimpse of the girl at the front exit as-he struggled to reach her. The packed aisle had him blocked for the mo- enney Jackson —— ment, and as he raised his arm to force a way the black wallet in his hand caught his eye. It was half-opened; within the soft leather and silk lining were the edges of a thick press of Federal bank-notes. The uppermost one—new, unwrinkled, unused —was for one thousand dollars. In his own mordant and desperate mood Hildreth, with a swift unthinking cunning, swept the bill-case within his coat. The crowded homegoers had not given him or it a second’s glance. But as the car jarred on slowly over the intersecting rails the young man looked back. A tall young woman, heavily veiled, standing near the rear, was watching him with an amazed intensity, he thought —and almost of relief. He shrugged impatiently as he reached the front platform, hesitated. ‘“A thousand!” he muttered. ‘“ What wouldn’t it mean—to me?” And Hildreth paused with a savage, vin- dictive revolt against the decent world he had known. him, motionless in the rain. Apparently she had not moved. There in the rain, among the bulbous black um- brella tops of hurrying pedestrians, the police and the traffic, the blurred lights of State Street showed her face raised in a sort Then swinging out from the — step he saw the girl who had sat ahead of of terror to the gray deeps of the slanting | storm above her. Slender, delicate, one hand to her lips, as if suddenly overcome with a portentous realization that numbed her brain. 379 CoMmlcbooo S (CO) in