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124 got to the Janses', and there was a deserted gravel-pit just after you got by, but that's all the trace of civilization there was on that road. Say, but it was lonesome!

Isabel Janse lived all alone up there with her old gramma and grandpa Janse, and you couldn't call them exactly cheerful company. Their minds had begun to go back on 'em, and Isabel didn't have anything to talk normal to but a dozen hens, and a cow, and an old twenty-year-old horse that had begun to go lame.

Up-stairs in her bottom bureau drawer Isabel had got fifteen dollars stowed away. She'd got it 'stead of a revolver, she said, so's when the time came she couldn't stand it any more she could up and clear out.

The fifteen dollars was given her by one of them antique furniture-men, for a high-boy, that used to belong to her mother. She said she knew the high-boy was worth more'n fifteen dollars, but 'twa'n't worth fifteen cents to her, standin' up-stairs there in the hall, even if it was solid mahogany. Solid mahogany wouldn't pay for a ticket on a railroad train, would it, or old brass handles for a piece of bread-and-butter in a strange city?

"Except for that fifteen dollars," Isabel once told me, "there'd be three of us off in the top story