9
It began to be whispered about that the STRANGS were seeing hard times; but, if they were, they uttered no complaint, tor they were proud, and their distress was a family secret.
At last, however, there came a ray of sunshine through the clouds, and TOM secured what promised to be a steady job for several months on city improvements. Hope sprung again into a breast easily made happy. He could be heard every morning before daybreak whistling cheerfully as he took his long journey clear to the farthest end of the city where his work lay, and a little of the old brightness began to enter the gloomy home of the STRANGS.
But, alas for the man who cannot live without depending on his fellow-men to let him! He had scarcely worked a week when a body of men met, drew a line, and said that no man who lived outside that line should work inside it. Poor Strang's little cabin was just twelve feet over the line, and Tom was discharged, denied once more honorable access to the bounty of nature through the medium of honest labor.
This was Strang's last job. He went sadly home to his wife and little ones, his big, brave heart crushed. How they lived since no one knew. Men saw the powerful form of Tom Strang wasting away day by day, yet never knew that the disease that was gnawing at the noble fellow's vitals was Hunger. His children never begged, and even they, poor innocents! never dreamed that he was starving himself to keep life in them as long, as possible.
But before brutal man had finished his work, Mother Nature came to the rescue. The crops appeared, and as Tom Strang stood perhaps on the brow of the hill near the little cabin which contained his starving family, and his hungry eyes, sweeping the Hudson, feasted upon fields of corn and vegetables on Erastus Corning's Island—is it a wonder if he said to himself, "Necessity knows no law," or cried, in the bitterness of his spirit: "First my family, next my God, and curse my country and all its laws!"?
On that island, one night after midnight, TOM STRANG met his death. While leaving the island with a pillow-case full of potatoes, he was pursued by a watchman, and, although his burden impeded his progress, he clung to it with the clutch of a miser to gold, while bullets whistled past his head. He clung to it because it contained the morrow's food for his starving children. He clung to it until the cowardly, murderous brute behind drove two bullets into his defenseless body, and he tumbled headlong in the path. Then, true to his cowardly nature, the brute who shot him dared not touch him.
