United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The old man spoke with dignity, but the coarseness of the fellow's nature and the hardening influence of the business he was engaged in prevented him from feeling either shame or sympathy, for he turned toward the door with an oath, saying: "You'll hear from me in the morning, old chap, but I'll tell you this to chew on over night; that if your tax money isn't ready when I come again, I'll teach you what it is to break the laws in this city, and insult the officers whose duty it is to see them enforced against just such white-headed old dead-beats as you!" and with another oath, he passed out of the door and shut it with a slam.
They gripped us all, and marched us right along, straight for the graveyard, which was a mile and a half down the river, and the whole town at our heels, for we made noise enough, and it was only nine in the evening. As we went by our house I wished I hadn't sent Mary Jane out of town; because now if I could tip her the wink she'd light out and save me, and blow on our dead-beats.
It was Jim who took command of his house, "bossed" his two female servants, arranged his railway tours, superintended his kitchen with a view to his own individual tastes; valeted him, kept his cigars within a certain prescribed limit by a firm actuarial principle which transferred any surplus to his own use; gave him good advice, weighed up his friends and his enemies with shrewd sense; and protected him from bores and cranks, borrowers and "dead-beats."
I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds regular dead-beats. There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy."
"Really, I couldn't think of putting you out. I can stay on the Santa Cruz as well as not." "I couldn't hear to such a thing. You're tired of ship life everybody is and I have lots of room too much room. It's a pleasure to meet real people this damn country is so full of crooks and dead-beats. No, sir, you'll stay right here where it is cool and comfortable."
The utterances of that congregation of unclean adders, the resolutions adopted by that sanctified body of dead-beats in the sanctum sanctorum of the Baptists, was a bid for blood-injected the idea into the warty heads of a trio of thugs that by way-laying and beating me to death they would pass into history as heroes.
"Is it yours to sell?" "It is." There was no trace of resentment in his voice, nor did he show the slightest irritation at being asked so pointed a question. "Vell, I don't keep a pawn-shop. I got no license, and if I had I vouldn't do it too much trouble all de time. Poor vomans, dead-beats, suckers, sneak-thieves all kind of peoples you don't vant, to come in the door vhen you have a pawn-shop."
They regarded him with awe, even forgetting to drink when, in certain stages of his cups, he entertained by the hour in one or other of the groggeries a circle of the most abandoned characters in New York thieves, cracksmen, murderers actual or potential, "shoulder-hitters," sailors who came ashore to drink the fieriest rum they could find, prostitutes, dead-beats, degenerates, derelicts with a flow of talk that was like the flashing of jewels in the gutter.
I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds regular dead-beats. There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy."
It was not a love epistle, at least, not such a one as he would have written, it did not give the address nor the name of the correspondent; but he read the following with greedy eyes: "Perhaps it's just as well that you don't rig yourself out for the benefit of those dead-beats at the Crossing, or any tramp that might hang round the ranch. Keep all your style for me when I come.
Word Of The Day