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Kansas University Weekly.
With the Coming of the Dawn.
'Twas almost morning. If the man in the attic bedroom of a many—storied flat knew it, he had not calculated the hours by the chimes from the neighboring steeple, he had not listened for them, nor did the bare furnishings of his room include any time-piece. Perhaps his strained ears, listening for footsteps, heard the coming traffic of the day already beginning to stir across the river, and in the upper city; or perchance his straining eyes, watching for pursuers may have discerned an almost imperceptible lightening of the east. All night, up and down the cheerless room, had sounded the muffled tread of his stockinged feet, now slow and soft, now restless and hurried. Ever and anon he stopped at one of the curtainless windows, to listen, or peer anxiously into the darkness of the street far below. He shivered, though the wind from the bay blew warm across the city. No light burned in the room, but the night-lamp in the corridor without, threw over the transom into the room a shaft of yellow light. This mellow ray spread dark, grewsome shadows across the floor and about the walls. The man in his fear and rage, cursed, and defied the shadows, but he dared not open the door to extinguish the lamp.
With every article of furniture within his shabby little room, he had barred the bolted door. He had left his only coat in the eager clutch of his pursuers, and from the bosom of his shirt, peeps the handle of his revolver. All during the dark, still night, desperate thoughts and wild alarms had worked madness in his passion-burned brain. To him the spring night's wind seemed to carry poisonous perfumes of fresh, warm blood, and the lick of the waves about the piers, a block away, sounded to his guilty ears, like accusing voices. He is desperate and at bay, but he will die as he has lived—in a mad struggle against the withering breath of a threatening fate. He has accomplished his vengeance, and its fruits are despair and death. Society may now, in its turn, avenge itself upon his poor passion-racked body, and
heaven upon his miserable, blighted soul, but not till he has fought his enemies once more.
One chamber of his revolver is empty. One shot had sufficed to do the deed. Four only remained. He thinks of this, and seeks for more cartridges at the bottom of his little trunk. In vain. Only a few old photographs at the very bottom, beneath the rags. Only four shots. Then these must tell. His aim must be sure, and he himself, composed. These pictures may serve to interest him, and calm his fevered mind. He carries them into the little patch of yellow light, and, spreading them over the floor, kneels above them. They are the likenesses of his old friends and his relatives. Here are his father's stern and bitter brow and eyes; and stern and bitter had been that father's words, when one summer's night, he drove his son from his door. There was his mother's face, that, hushed and white with tearful eyes, one wild eve beneath the chestnuts on the hill, watched him depart for the great world. This other crushed and mangled bit of board had been his brother's picture. To-night that brother's voice was silent, stilled in death by the hand which now trembling smoothed the crumpled picture.
Ah, here was her's at last. A face of basilisk beauty, charming with a languid eye and careless smile. A face that since boyhood he had brooded over. The devotion of a careless youth had become in manhood a love, for the sake of which he had paid hope, heaven and a brother's life. Whether she loved that brother or him, it mattered little now.
As he gathered up the pictures he laughed a bitter laugh, and then his lips choked down a cry of sadness. He placed the pictures upon the window sill, that they might see him die. At the window he paused, and stood looking out into the silent, happy sky. In the east, a rosy-red star was taking up the neglected watch of a thousand other sleepy stars, that dipped and winked as if fatigued with the vigil of the night. The memories called up by the pictures seemed to have relaxed the tension in his brain. A softening influence had crept