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 an engine. How he lost that eye was a secret he guarded with grim silence, and no one was ever known to ask him twice.

Though five years older, he was Gordon's classmate at Wabash College.

Overman had always scorned the suggestion of an artificial eye. He swore he would never stick a piece of glass in his head to deceive fools. He used to tell Gordon that he was the only one-eyed man in New York who had the money to buy a glass eye and didn't do it.

"I prefer life's grim little joke to stand as it is," he said, as he snapped his big jaws together and twisted the muscles of his mouth into a sneer. He had a habit, when he closed an emphatic speech, of twisting the muscles of his mouth in that way. When animated in talk, he was the incarnation of disobedience, defiance, scorn, success.

Two things he held in special pride—hatred for women and a passionate love for game-cocks. He allowed no woman on his place in any capacity, and, by the sounds day and night, he kept at least a thousand roosters. He would drop the profoundest discussion of philosophy or economics at the mention of a chicken, and with a tender smile plunge into an endless eulogy of his pets.

Gordon found him in a chicken yard fitting gaffs on two cocks.

"Caught in the act!" he cried.

"Well, who cares? They've got to fight it out.