Page:Over the Sliprails - 1900.djvu/58

 to stop this’ (the liquor I suppose he meant) ‘and pull yourself together; and I don’t think you’ll do that—I know men. The other is to throw up the Advertiser—it’s doing you no good—and clear out.’ ‘I won’t do that,’ says Drew. ‘Then shoot yourself,’ said the Doctor. ‘(There’s another flask in the cupboard). You know what this hole is like. … She’s a good true girl—a girl as God made her. I knew her father and mother, and I tell you, Jack, I’d sooner see her dead than. …’ The roof roared again. I felt a bit delicate about the business and didn’t like to disturb them, so I knocked off for the day.

“About a week before that I was down in the bed of the Redclay Creek fishing for ‘tailers’. I’d been getting on all right with the housemaid at the ‘Royal’—she used to have plates of pudding and hot pie for me on the big gridiron arrangement over the kitchen range; and after the third tuck-out I thought it was good enough to do a bit of a bear-up in that direction. She mentioned one day, yarning, that she liked a stroll by the creek sometimes in the cool of the evening. I thought she’d be off that day, so I said I’d go for a fish after I’d knocked off. I thought I might get a bite. Anyway, I didn’t catch Lizzie—tell you about that some other time.

“It was Sunday. I’d been fishing for Lizzie about an hour when I saw a skirt on the bank out of the tail of my eye—and thought I’d got a bite, sure. But I was had. It was Miss Wilson strolling along the bank in the sunset, all by her pretty self. She was a slight girl, not very tall, with reddish frizzled hair, grey