Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/59

 George was greatly excited by the possibilities revealed. He explained the principle to his brother Jim, now eighteen, sly, furtive, oversophisticated, but still his brother, for whom George continued to hope the best, even against his better judgment. He emphasized this belief by setting Jim up in another stand, the duplicate of the first, and located two blocks distant on Griswold Street. But Jim absconded at the end of the first week with some seventy-two dollars of the little news-stand's funds. For George to lose a dime in these days was like losing a drop of heart's blood, but he gritted his teeth and never told his father and mother why it was that Jim did not come home at all now, or, indeed, that he had departed from the city.

Yet this final defection of his brother was a discouraging blow to struggling youth. It hurt George while it hardened him. His life was now all strain and struggle anyway; up betimes each morning to carry his paper route, then came next an hour on the news-stand, at the end of which he set old Nick Cross going for the day and made hasty strides to school and the lessons that he somehow found time to con half-way at least. In the after-school hours there was no play for him. He hurried to the news-stand once more to take up that keen chase for nickels, dimes, pennies that continued till seven or later in the evening. Arrived at home he was accus-