Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/296

 washed deck. But it was also as if these friendly-cast buoys were anchored by lines too short to reach their object, Herself being overboard in a sea so troubled that silent sympathy and spoken cheer alike were ineffectual to lift her head above the waves.

Herself had been robbed, duped, stripped of her hard years' earnings by the most despicable scoundrel that ever operated on earth since the days of the serpent in the garden who wheedled the first frail lady of them all out of man's birthright of ease. Herself had traded off her good gould money for less than the trivial fruit the first woman to attempt barter received. Herself had not come out of the transaction with as much as a prune.

It was nothing to the jerries that Burnett had gone off with a million and a half of dollars borrowed through fraud from Kansas City bankers; with Jim Justice's hard scrapings through a long, close-dealing life; with a bit here, a little there, out of many a poor man's pocket in Damascus; with Little Jack Ryan's savings, and all he could gather by a bold front and alluring representations from everybody that ever called him friend.

All that larger and equally heartless robbery did not move the jerries. They would have passed it lightly, with maybe a laugh at Little Jack Ryan, who was not considered a regular railroad man, but rather a hanger-on at the heels of trainmen and station agent, and other weaklings who never had felt the feel of a shovel in their fists.

They would have admired Burnett a little for his shrewdness, perhaps, if his sly planning and gathering for this big day of defalcation had not involved Herself, bringing her to such misery, such weeping and wailing,