Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/301

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at stake, the example of the braves wuz goadin' him on. He hid behind a tall clump of elderberry bushes and shot his dastardly foe as he wuz wendin' his way peacefully home from church on a Sunday night. The ball woonded the man, but not fatally, and the next month saw Cicero in prison. He wrote home for some novels and cigarettes, which Tamer Ann sent to solace him in his confinement, and for a time the neighborhood wuz at peace and breathed freely.

Hamen wuz jest crushed by the blow, and went round lookin' like an old man before his time. Tamer had to git a new box of novels to comfort her, and she developed eight new diseases durin' the next two months. It wuz hard for 'em, I pitied 'em from nearly the bottom of my heart. Clear down in the bottom of my heart lay the conviction that Tamer had brought on all this sorrow and sin, had opened the door and let her bandits and banditta come in, luggin' all this misery in with 'em, and so I told Josiah. Cicero's reputation wuz such they couldn't git his sentence shortened; he went for ten years.

As for the neighborin' boy and girl, who used to pour over the novels with Cicero, durin' the next two years the boy shot another one and killed him and wuz sent to prison for life, and the girl run away with a circus man who had already several wives in different parts of the country. She didn't take all her clothin' with her, for she left in haste, but she took "The Disguised Hero of the Sawdust; or, The Clown Prince." It wuz Tamer's book.

The girl wuz brought back by her father, but she wuz ruined for life in the estimation of her neighbors, Tamer wouldn't allow Anna to speak to her if she met her on the street; Tamer wuz dretful bitter now on her, and said