Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/80

68 such naked poverty breed in the most sensitive soul! Day after day Viola must have passed this way, must have seen the human spiders waiting in their dark web, perhaps might have chaffered with them, or recognized her own jewelry among the tarnished relics in the pawnbroker's window.

He turned into the wider avenue, where gentility had once dwelt in its bulky palaces. They seemed to stare with wide, unshuttered windows, drearily speculating on the desolation of the street and their own decay. Around them gardens stretched unkempt and parched, here and there an aloe or some vigorously growing shrub striking a note of color in the uniform grayness. High iron gates, richly wrought, but eaten into by rust, hung open from broken hinges, or were tied together with ravelings of rope. One of the most imposing, still standing upright, was held ajar with a piece of broken brick. It gave entrance to a circular sweep of driveway and a large garden full of rankly growing shrubs and vines and headless statues, with a rusty fountain-basin in the center, and urns still showing the corpses of geraniums. Inside Gault saw some of the children of the neighborhood playing games, and realized that the broken brick was evidently of their introduction. This was the house which had been built by Jerry McCormick thirty-odd years be-