turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested
witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It
was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried
out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a
belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they
got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have
died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.

In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is
shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting
away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own
walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence.
But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at
the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the
burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those
who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was
not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of
flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a
tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service
and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the
grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of
what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And
she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point
plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He
had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing
it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter
had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading
firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests--her
mother's and her own--in an action for damages against the street-car
company.

However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit.
The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one
of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the
costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in
settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a
special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late
Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law.