Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1916-06-02

the racing switch engines awoke his
numbed senses to one certain fact
he must get out of town.
The red glare of the cooks vacant
socket haunted him and babe him flee
from retribution. The fact that he had
no money and no clothes only added
to his desire to put miles between him
and the consequences of his deed. All
resentment faded from his mind. There
was nothing he would not have given
to undo what his mad wrath had &C
eomplished. He must go.
Arrest, the hand of the law, was as
nothing to his conscience and the red
eyed horror that must ever stare at
him with it's hideous vacantness. He
must find new scenes in which to for
get 1t.
At the edge of the yards he came
upon a switch shanty. The door was
open, and the coats and hats of the
night shift hung upon its dim walls,
inviting him to clothe himself for the
journey. Wilson slipped quickly in,
seized one of each, regardless of size
or fit, clothed himself and drifted up
the main line.
A freight was just pulling out. He
had no idea of its destination; that
was no matter, but it was moving,
moving away from the scene of his
horror. He grasped a door slide as it
ran past him, swung in on the rods
with the ease of long practice and soon
the whine of the wheels was droning
In his ears as the train rocked and
swayed along in the night, bearing him
away, away, away. But still he could
not shut out the red stare of the sight
less socket that seemed to haunt him,
quences of a mad impulse.
1t was this incident more than any.
thing else that put an end to Wilson's
vagabondage and humbled his foolish
pride until at length he sat before the
parental board where the veal had
been kept hot for him.
A year, two years passed, and as the
dust of each respectable day settled
down upon his disreputable past his
life as a knight of the road hid itself
under the pleasant gray coating and be.
came a dim and dingy memory until
all its tawdry details faded into a
misty hulk which the kindly ashes of
time covered with Oblivion.
But one thing stared and glared at
him out of the past-the sightless
socket that was more of an evil eye
than any sorcerer of fable possessed.
The material success that awaited him
ON hic hnnoaanr,inn u-oC not hp;rhf
enough to dim that grewsome memory.
The more his fortunes improved the
more insistent became its gaze.
No murderer was more persistently
haunted by the ghost of his victim than
was Wilson by this living specter. 1t
peered into his privacy, it leered at
him when he surrounded himself with
society. Always he knew that some
living man was carrying about the
thing he had killed-that that man was
the walking tomb of a darkness that
he, Wilson, had created in red wrath.
Love came to him, but could not
blind him to the horror of the past.
He feared to accept the sweet promise
that a woman modestly held out to him
for fear that their very union might
eliminate in a terror more persistent
than the one he lived in. He could see
his child born with that awful badge
of his mental vision materialized in a
baby face branded at birth with a
sightless socket to p%erpetuate his pun
ishment. That was the final pressure
on his crown of thorns.
Again the wanderlust stirred in him,
and he packed his grip, arranged his
the road, this time fortified by a bank
account and with the excuse of a wider
field for the success that he had made.
And so the eye became a restless
goad, driving him hither and thither
with its evil ray that seemed like the
light of a red star travelling through
time. From city to city he wandered,
always away from the scene of his
evil adventure, until at last he walked
the thoroughfare of a city divided by
a continent from his Nemesis, as he
thought. And her fate confronted
him.
Faultlessly dressed, radiating an at
u1OCphCAC VI PAOcPNAt LIZ
was strolling aimlessly, seeking dis
traction in the passing crowd, when
suddenly his eye caught the profile of
the cooks face. He was on the left
side, and the socket was filed with a
glass eye glaring with a dead, I'M
winking, unforgtving stare.
The cook had altered sadly. Fortune
had evidently laid a heavy hand upon
him, for his bovine bulk had shrunk
with the reducing flesh until his shah
by clothes hung Imply upon his form
as upon a rack. Wilson noted that his
shoes were dilapidated and his whole
appearance that of n who was tread
ing hard ways.
He walked close to him, hoping he
was mistaken, but there was no deny
ing the familiarity of the features