Only that Christmas he had gutted
every store in town. ``Give me everything
you have, brother,'' he said, across
each counter; and next day every man,
woman, and child in the mountain
town had a present from the Senator's
hands. He looked like a brigand that
day, as he looked now, but he called
every man his brother, and his eye,
while black and lustreless as night, was
as brooding and just as kind.
When the boom went down, with it
and with everybody else went the Senator.
Slowly he got dusty, ragged,
long of hair. He looked tortured and
ever-restless. You never saw him still;
always he swept by you, flapping his
legs on his lean horse or his arms in
his rickety buggy here, there, everywhere--
turning, twisting, fighting his
way back to freedom--and not a murmur.
Still was every man his brother,
and if some forgot his once open hand,
he forgot it no more completely than
did the Senator. He went very far to
pay his debts. He felt honor bound,
indeed, to ask his sister to give back
the farm that he had given her, which,
very properly people said, she declined
to do.
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