Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/134

 one of the blacksmith's strikers in the Boiler Works, knew the horse-shoer who traveled with the Sells' Circus, and on the day of the performance had drunk two glasses of beer with him and had talked about it as though it had been nothing at all!

It was in the densest crowd on Main Street that Lonely made out Annie Eliza Gubtill, clinging to her mother's hand, and for one weak yet human moment he indulged in a not inaudible titter of triumph. In fact, he turned deliberately, and bowing with that grace and ease which was an outcropping of the courtly self-complacency of his maturer days, he threw a kiss directly and unmistakably at Annie Eliza.

Something about that mottled nose and that wide and expansive smile, touched with its hungry looking mock humility, seemed strangely familiar to Annie Eliza. She looked again, and, seeing one telltale shoulder hunched, yet not more than an inch above the other, she suddenly cried out shrilly:

"Why, it 's Lonely O'Malley! O-o-o-oh, it is Lonely O'Malley!"

And even the neglect and perfidy of other