United States or Trinidad and Tobago ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A taciturn and eternally dead-broke man, in a rural region, need not fear intrusion on his privacy. Convivial folk make detours round him, as if he were a mud puddle. Thriftier and more respectable neighbors eye him askance or eye him not at all. But when a meed of permanent success comes to such a man he need no longer be lonely unless he so wills. Which is not cynicism, but common sense.
An odd expression came over the gambler's face. "Look here," he said abruptly, "I have passed my word to the crowd yonder that you are a dead-broke miner called Fowler. I allowed that you might have had some row with that Sydney duck, Australian Pete, in the mines. That satisfied them.
"'The Scalpers of the Plains. There's five men murdered in the first act. Oh, it's elegant!" "Why don't you go, then, Dick?" "Cause I'm dead-broke busted. That's why. I aint had much luck this week, and it took all my money to pay for my lodgin's and grub." "Do you want very much to go to the theatre, Dick?" "Of course I do; but it aint no use.
The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that thirty dollars of good American chink one day in the Soviet part of Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of the Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at the famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke millionaire.
"I told Frank not to mind the way you spoke," said Dick. "Your friend will lend you some, then." "Not much," answered Dick, laughing. "I'm dead-broke. Haven't you got any money, Mr. Mills?" "I have a little," grumbled the blind man; "but this boy may take it, and never come back." "If you think so," said Frank, proudly, "you'd better engage some other boy." "No use; you're all alike.
"Look here," said Dick, "I'd better let you know right away that I'm dead-broke." "Never mind," said the other; "come along and feed, and then we'll yap." A good meal, and a good smoke after it, and the little Jew said abruptly, "Now then, Mr. Sydney, I've found out a bit about you this morning, and if you want a job, I think I can get one for you.
And he replied, brusquely: "I let you think I was a dead-broke work-hunter. I did that, because I needed to get into your brother's house, to make certain of things which we suspected but couldn't quite prove. I am the ninth man, in the past two months, to try to get in there. And I'm the second to succeed. The first couldn't find out anything of use. He could only confirm some of our ideas.
"Yes," said the man huskily. "She said she'd let me know, one way or another, when it is safe to do so. Don't cry, Ruby. They're better off. They couldn't 'ave stayed on, God knows. And God will take care of 'em." "I wish she'd said just where she's really bound for," muttered the other man, a tall ungainly fellow. "She's mighty near dead-broke, and I'm I'm uneasy, Joey."
Divested of the legal encumbrances with which such documents are usually weighted, Clancy's story ran substantially as follows: "I was sergeant in K troop, and Gower was in F. We had been stationed together six months or so when ordered out on the Indian campaign that summer. I was dead-broke. All my money was gone, and my wife kept bothering me for more.
Scarlet, angrily. "Now he will spend another five years in the dungeon where my poor man died of a broken heart. Watson told me that the infamous Dyke Darrel was in Chicago; but I had no thought of his recognizing the boy. Can you lend me some money, Nick?" "A purty question, Madge. Don't you know I'm always dead-broke?" growled Brower. "What in the nation do you want with money any how?"
Word Of The Day