hild. I'd
be no worse off than I was, anyway.

"The next morning I felt better. I got ready to leave, bid all my fellow
flat-wheels good-by; and had a gig ordered to take me to the train--the
doctor had given me two-hundred dollars a short time before--'from a
lady friend.'

"As I sat waiting for the hack, they brought me a letter from home--a
big one, with a picture in it. It was from my youngest sister, and the
picture was of her ten-year boy, named for me--such a happy, sunny
little Swede face you never see. 'He always talks of Uncle Oscar as a
great and good man,' wrote Carrie, 'and says every day that he's going
to do just like you. He will do nothing that we tell him Uncle Oscar
would not like, and anything that he would. If you are as good as he
thinks you are, you are sure of heaven.'

"And I was even then going off to live with a woman who made a fortune
out of Virginia City dance-houses. I had a sort of a remorseful chill,
and before I really knew just where I was, I had got to Arizona, and
from there to the Santa Fe where you knew me.

"I wrote my benefactress an honest letter, and told her why I had not
come, and in a short time sent her the money she had put up for me; but
it was returned again, and I sent it to the mission for my little girl.

"Well, while I was with you there, I got a fare-thee-well letter, saying
that when I got that Mabel Verne would be no more--same as dead--and
that she had deposited forty thousand dollars in the Phoenix Bank for
_your_ little girl--_yours_, mind ye--and asked me to adopt her legally
and tell her that her mother was dead.

"John, I ain't heard of that woman from then until now. I thought she
had got tired of waiting on me and got married, but I believe she is
dead.

"I went to California and adopted the baby--a daisy too--and I've
honestly tried to be a father to her.

"I got to making money in outside speculations, and had plenty; so I let
her money accumulate at the Phoenix and paid her way myself.

"About four years ago, I left the road for good; bought me a nice place
just outside of Oakland, and settled down to take a little comfort.

"Mabel, my daughter Mabel, for she called me papa, went to Germany,
nearly three years ago, in charge of her music teacher, Sister Florence,
to finish herself off. Ah, John, you ort to see her claw ivory! Before
she went, she called me into the mission parlor, one day, and almost got
me into a snap; she wanted me to tell