“And now you’ll live forever!” cried the disappointed speculator, suddenly recognizing, in the uncertain light on the platform of the car, the features of the stalwart _cestui que vie_. Once more he was chewing hard on his cigar, once more inveighing against his accursed luck, as he stretched the newspaper toward the dull lamp of the car, indicating with a trembling hand the big head-lines chronicling the discovery, while the cumbrous vehicle went gliding along through the blue haze of the dusk and the smoke and the dust,--the medium through which the looming blocks of buildings and the long double file of electric lights were visible down the avenue. “You’ll live forever, while those men make millions on the tract they euchred me out of at ten dollars an acre! It would be a charity for you to fall off the car and break your backbone. They tell me concussion of the brain is painless. I’ll swear I’d feel justified if I should hide in a dark alley, some night, and garrote you as you go by to the club.” “There’s another case of garroting in the paper,” observed a mutual acquaintance by way of diversion. “I noticed it. That’s what reminded me of it. It’s like lassoing. I lived a long time in Texas,” he said, as he swung himself off at a side-street, and disappeared in the closing haze that baffled the incandescent lights showing upon its density in yellow blurs without illuminating it. “You’d better look out for that man, sure enough,” the literal-minded mutual acquaintance warned Lucien Royce. “He feels mighty sore. This company is going to make ‘big money’ on his land.” But Royce laughed it off. “I am the one who lives,” he boasted.