The Fourth R by George Oliver Smith
page 15 of 268 (05%)
page 15 of 268 (05%)
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giving him some education in radioactivity. He was old enough to learn--
Learn--? _No more, now that his father and mother were dead._ Some of the real meaning of his loss came to him then, and the growing knowledge that this first shocking loss meant the ultimate loss of everything was beginning to sink in. He broke down and cried in the misery of his loss and his helplessness; ultimately his emotion began to cry itself out, and he began to feel resentment against his position. The animal desire to bite back at anything that moved did not last long, it focused properly upon the person of his tormentor. Then for a time, Jimmy Holden's imagination indulged in a series of little vignettes in which he scored his victory over Paul Brennan. These little playlets went through their own evolution, starting with physical victory reminiscent of his Jack-and-the-Beanstalk days to a more advanced triumph of watching Paul Brennan led away in handcuffs whilst the District Attorney scanned the sheaf of indisputable evidence provided by James Quincy Holden. Somewhere along about this point in his fantasy, a breath of the practical entered, and Jimmy began to consider the more sensible problem of what sort of information this sheaf of evidence would contain. Still identifying himself with the books he knew, Jimmy Holden had progressed from the fairy story--where the villain was evil for no more motive than to provide menace to the hero--to his more advanced books, where the villain did his evil deeds for the logical motive of personal |
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