y
to pay our way for life, and we hoped to make an almighty pile before
many years had gone; but I couldn't bear not hearing from them as I
worked for, and in the fall of the year I went back to New York--under
protest from my partner, who could do nothing without me--and I never
rested until I reached my house in Fifty-Fourth Street. I found it shut
up, the furniture gone, not a sign of living being in it; and when I
went to make inquiries amongst my neighbours, they told me what came to
this. My wife had died of starvation--nothing less, boy, for the devil
I'd sent the money to had doled out to her and the lad a few dollars
for the first year, but had cut and run when the big sums reached him;
and he took the boy with him on the pretence of a job in the Southern
city. My son, you see, had turned naturally to architect's work, and
was induced by this long-toothed vulture to quit New York, because they
heard from the mine that I was dead--that I died, as Leveston had told
them, of small-pox--and left not a shilling for them. God! if only I
could bring him to life to clutch his cursed throat again!"

"But what became of your son?" I asked, as he ceased speaking, and we
lay riding gently over the long rollers, with a great flood of sunlight
making the sea as a sheet of beaten gold, touched with diamond points
where the spray broke. Then he went on with it; but you could see some
awful emotion moving him, and he kept plying himself with drink, which
made his words the fiercer.

"What became of the boy?" he repeated after me. "Why, he went south in
the hope of sending money to his mother; and directly he reached
Charleston, Leveston shipped him on a brig, knowing that I must hear of
his doings in a month or more. He sent the lad to Panama, and there he
died, one of the first to be stricken in the fever land. They buried
him in the country, as the Lord is my witness. Then I came home--rich,
my trunks stuffed with notes, able, if I cared, to buy up half the
land-agents in New York City; and the money I'd got seemed to turn
black in my hands when I found that those it was made for needed it no
more. Not as I knew then of the lad's death--that I was to hear of
later; but, free from the drink, I had loved the woman who was gone;
and I was a madman for days and weeks. When I got my head again I
changed as I don't believe any man ever changed before; there was
something in my mind which I could not cope with. I can't lay it down