Hell Fer Sartain and Other Stories by John Fox
page 58 of 66 (87%)
page 58 of 66 (87%)
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thicker than snowflakes, and, through
the foolish policy of the company, foreclosures had to be made. Grayson went to the wall like the rest of us. I asked him what he had done with the money he had made. He had given away a great deal to poorer kindred; he had paid his dead father's debts; he had played away a good deal, and he had lost the rest. His faith was still imperturbable. He had a dozen rectangles of ``dirt,'' and from these, he said, it would all come back some day. Still, he felt the sudden poverty keenly, but he faced it as he did any other physical fact in life--dauntless. He used to be fond of saying that no one thing could make him miserable. But he would talk with mocking earnestness about some much- dreaded combination; and a favorite phrase of his--which got to have peculiar significance--was ``the cohorts of hell,'' who closed in on him when he was sick and weak, and who fell back when he got well. He had one strange habit, too, from which I got comfort. He would deliberately walk into and defy any temptation that beset him. That was the way he strengthened himself, he said. I knew what his temptation |
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