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1 ■ f >■ i . -■■rr.i- r' ■)/ / /THtntSDAT. KOVEMfiEB 7. 1935 - . ./ v„4 r!, THif CLINTON CHRONICLE, CUNTQN, S; a FIRST INSTALLMENT Rose Morris was at once the rich est ancl the prettiest girl in Dover, Michigan.' She drove a sleek, fat lit tle pony hitched to a marvelous wicker dogcart, the envy of every ,child in town^mnd to Jimmy Rowan, ahe represented all that was both de-i sirable nhd nnntUinable. By the time be wu fift^ he waa hopelessly in love with her and he carved hearts and arrows on all the trees in^his yard and initialed them wrote her passionate misspelled love mines, or at the gambling tshleei'the one perhaps best known of all was ‘The Michigan Kid." He it was who best typified the composure, the steady nerve, the recklessness of his profes sion. • ^ : A hundred stories were told about the Michigan Kid and some were not pleasant, for it required a ruthless man to hold down the job that Jim had^ taken, but most of them had to doVith his luck. That luck became a byword, finally; men blessed with ' Some of these newcomers were pos sessed of. the gambling fever and they tried their luck against The Michi gan Ki^’s. Ruiqors spread of big games in the back rooms of the Kid’s place, gkmes where the sky was the limit. One man in particular scoffed at “!)Jichigan’s luck” and pr9phesied that he would “get” the Kid—send him out of the country broke. This was ugly rumors sucn as tn^se through the streets, but whether, they reach the ears of the Kid nobody ever knew! Perhaps they did. Perhaps that was why ne sold his place two weeks later and without' w muchjas saying good-bye to anybody he caught the ’[next down-river boat. « * ■ When Jim Rowan closed the door of his^ steamer stateroom behind him, he closed' it, /as he thought, upon The Michigan Kid and everything that had tor do with that notorious charscter. When the first bend of the river had hidden Dawson City from view he drew from his pocket a wallet, and from this he carefully extracted a blurry, thne-yellbWed picture of'Rose' Morris. It Was a picture he had clip ped from a Dover newspaper on the day Rose graduated from the local high school and it showed her as a gfrl found her was another matter. When he board^ the steamship at St. Michael he saw no familiar faces, and, inasmuch as his name meant nothirtfe to nis fellow passengers, he felt a great^relief. Already he had- be- gmn to realize, as he had not realizea in Dawson, that whatever The Michi gan Kid may have stood for on the/ upper river, back home^that namaij^ansi would ^tand for something al^geth^'^^ j. A. RAGE Sm^ a Colonel Johnson, a great engineer!in white with a floppy hat and a sash with interkKldn, R’. and j',. rote, and « word, of fi» ho told hori*^: of his. undying devotion. Ho neveri ahd mining promoter who represented i ^ne and only personal pos- a Xxindon syndicate. He and R^wan heps the one and only personal pos- r 1- sent the notes, of course, and his declarations were only whispered to the empty air, for he still remained **l^~Rbwa~ir ^rd^8 people were' desperately poor and he was cursed with a sensitive pride. Jkn was surprised one day to hear that Mr. Hiram Morris had ‘‘gone but of business" and was leaving for the West. What that meant the boy did not knbw but he understood that tne Morris fortune was not what it had been. Rose and her mother remained Dover. They lived on much as in Michi gan's luck" became an AlMkan phrase. More than once Rowan took stock of his winnings and realized that he Jia4 nearly attained the~goal he ha4 set for himself, but invariably Fi|te intervened to' prevent him from quite reaching the quitting point. Time crept along. TTie cycle, of life for placer camps is brief. ' ' Dawson grew, flourished,'began to die; representatives of big companies appeared and bought up tracts of property; they talked of huge dredg ing and hydraulic projects. What the stakes were nobody knew, but they must have been enormous, and luck must have run the Kid’s wfy, as usuab -for Colonel- Johnson /rose finally, stepped out into'the hall and kilid himself. met, finally, much* as famous duel- lists meet, and behind locked doors they played for twenty hours. session that he had never risked los ing at some time or other. He gazed at it. now for quite a while. He wondered ifl^^'were still alive. different Back home! The words possess a pe culiar stgnifteanee for men'vriib bave not been ‘‘outside” in more than five years. Nobody bilt the homeward- bound Alaskan could in the least ap preciate them.- . , . * “At Ko'me' the ship ,tb for tweii- ty-four hours, Md Rowan went ashqra to see what the place looked like. Here again he passed unnoticed, and he was greatly cheered by that fact. If he could walk tlw streets of an Alaskan ^Id camp without being rec ognized, it argued .thgt he would have no difficulty whatever- in the big world outside. Hi$ attention was attracted by a poster which advertised an informal If so, ahe must have grown into a;rally of all the citizens of Nome who beautiful woman, yes, and a good wo man—here the gamWer was speaking. No doubt she was married. He pon dered this thought deliberately and it That at least was the story which was made public and which the auth orities accepted. Certain spiteful- minded persons whispered knowingly that this stoiy was all a fabrication: that “Michigan’s” luck had finaljy de- Of course he propose<l to find her serted him and that the shot had been fired inside, not outside, the room; awakened a feeling of regret too in definite to be called a pang, for long ago he had realized that it was not the flesh-and-blood *Rose Morris that he worshipped, but an idea and an ideal. hailed frmn Michigan. The meeting wasrto* be heW'that' ntght for*flie“pur- pose of general good-fellowship and acquaintanceship and with the ulti mate view of organizing a Wolverine society. Jim decided to'go. It turned out to be a pleasant gath ering. A glad-hand committee was at the door to (introduce strangers around; there was a program of en- ' Jim Rowan grinned. Hera was old- hbriii stirff. Ho wondered what tbes# pleasAHt-ficed men and women would think if they knew that the un obtrusive^ visitor. Was The Michigaa^ Kid, the‘ most notorious j ‘.‘sporting > iman” in all the north. I|[e heard his name mentioned diu:- > ii^f the Evening—v^hen a judge from - nsing delivered “a sfAeebh eulogizing - home state and referred ^tho Kid as “that unsavory character m tho upper Y^kqn who ha&_brQught — upon the fair name of our birthplace." Again^Jim grinned. Well, he had the money, anyhow. One has to pay some thing for success. . Npwhect didJie-hear-a name-^ooo;;;- a face that knew, with perhaps one exception—the face of an old man who s'at in a quiet corner. It was a bearded face, and the man was poorly dressed. He wore rubber boots and overalls and a ^aded threadbare macktlOw that hung loosely from his stooping shoul ders. His hair was thin and gray and he coughed a good deal. Jim. studied the old fellow’s profile and decide that he had probably seen the man across the gambling table or the bar—a_river of derelicts like this oM had flowed in and out of his place duriiig' these recent years. He had about put him out of his mind when the man rose to leave. Then Rowan started, leaned forward; his eyes fixed themselves ppon the stranger’s beard ed cheek. (Continued Next Week). ‘■5 that wa.s the one thing he had in mind tertainment, with refreshments prom- but what would happen when he had|ised afterward. Say- ‘I SAW IT IN THE CHRONICLE" Thank Youl ' usual and they referred -vaguely to those large interests which kept Mr. Morris away from home. But the pony and dogcart were gone and so were the high-stepping bays. It was while Jim was working his way through college that they quietly moved away. The Morris house sold for barely enough to pay the mort gage; X 'Some people endure poverty cheer fully, others with a grim stoicism; the majority of people who tre born poor accept it with a fatalistic resig-j nation and never look forward to any thing else. Jim Rowan was unlike any of these. He loathed poverty; it was unendu rable. It had kept him from know ing Rose Morris. He swore he would make himself rich for her sake. In time this became a fixed idea with him and he quit college and went to work savage'ly. It took him quite a while, however, to realize that riches are hot come by in a hurry and that he was getting nowhere. Jfe had lost track of the Morrises completely—there was no use of keep ing in. touch with them—but he still had his day-dreams, he still ^thought of himself as Rose’s prince who sooner or later would search her'out and seat her upon.a throne.^ Depression seized him bccassionally when he saw how hopeless was the task he had set for himself. " ’ ' At ¥uch >trme^ he grew desper^e and he told himself that no price was too great to pay for success; he long-* ed for some opportunity of becoming suddenly rich and vowed that he would sell his soul for such a chance. V The chance came finally, or it seem ed to come, with the news of the Klondike diwovery. Jim joined the first rush to the Yukon and he arrived in Dawson City with the firm determi nation to make a fortune somehow, anyhow. Here again however, he learned that money.was not to be had for the asking. Placer mining was a hazardous un dertaking, with the odds a thousand to one against success. Ehlucation counted for little in a country where men were judigred on a pick-and- shovel basis and paid for the actual work Hhey did. Jim saw that here was not the place in which to earn a fortune; here was nothing but ^pecu lation, chance, a gamble either with men or Avith nature. > In order to beat the game one had to risk all, then double his winnings and risk them again and again. To gamble here was not a sin, it was the daily practice of. ..everybody. Men gambled with death when they hit the » trail; they gambled again when they staked their labor and their time against Nature’s bedrock secrets, on ly they took longer chances than when they headed their chips on the rou lette table or dropped their “pokes” op the high card. There was this dif ference, too; Nature seldom played fairly, where as there wefe manj square gambling-bouses in Dawson. Jim Rowan fitted himself to his new surroundings and adapted him self to a new code of morals. He. played as other men played, except in one respect; he never played for the excitement or for the fun of it, he played only to win. He played for Rose Morris. He tried speculating' in claims, but he was unlucky; his only winnings came from the manip ulating of Dawson, City real estate or at cards, and the' time when he found himself the owner of a huge Front Street saloon and gambling house, to gether with a nickname of the Alask- ju flavor. Perhaps A score of people knew him as James iRowi^, but to the thousands that went in and out of hi* plao^ he was “The Michigan Kid.” That yas the way he even signed his che^jcs, for the name had brought him luck, and superstitiously he cli^g to it; Life flowed at a fjirious pace" in those eariy days. 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