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“Father,” cried Ellery Jackson quickly, “I haven’t any excuse to make—anything to say. I’ll tell you all about it if you’re still interested—if you can stand to hear——”
John Jackson rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Don’t feel too badly,” he said in his kind voice. “I guess I can always stand anything my son does.”
This was an understatement. For John Jackson could stand anything now forever—anything that came, anything at all.
— ◆ —
The Pusher-in-the-Face.
Woman’s Home Companion (February 1925)
The last prisoner was a man—his masculinity was not much in evidence, it is true; he would perhaps better be described as a “person,” but he undoubtedly came under that general heading and was so classified in the court record. He was a small, somewhat shriveled, somewhat wrinkled American who had been living along for probably thirty-five years.
His body looked as if it had been left by accident in his suit the last time it went to the tailor’s and pressed out with hot, heavy irons to its present sharpness. His face was merely a face. It was the kind of face that makes up crowds, grey in color with ears that shrank back against the head as if fearing the clamor of the city, and with the tired, tired eyes of one whose forebears have been underdogs for five thousand years.