Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/162

 old clothes in a river drift pile better than any he had to wear. He had had slim pickings so long that two dollars a week was ample to his mind—for a little while.

Then he saw himself cutting a good figure—wearing suits of clothes costing fifteen or sixteen dollars; he imagined himself wearing a three-dollar hat just as though he were used to it; he looked at his unmated shoes, and swore that he would get a good pair of shoes if he had to pay five dollars for them.

"That money'd never done that old scoundrel any good, anyhow," he said, his mind reverting to Junker Frest, who had worked through painful years gathering bones and old rubber and bottles on the sandbars in order that Macrado might have a fortune!

"Sho! He said five-ten thousand wa'n't 'nough for a man," Macrado sniffed, and his glance turned to search the other end of the boat.

The river night was star-flecked. The shadows looked ominous along the caving bank side. There were shapes out over the sandbar opposite which Macrado had seen before, but their significance he had never known till this hour. Frest had gone to join the procession that marches up and down the current of the Mississippi, and the shapes often leave the procession to dance on the wide sandbars, and any one might see them.