e had the cussedest luck of any beggar I know.

"Not that he cared for his luck, as long as he got enough to drink.
But he wore his friends out. At last they said they'd get up a
subscription and pay his passage out to the States, if he'd swear
never to show his ugly face in England again. Or at least not till
he knew how to behave himself, which was safe enough, and came to
the same thing, seeing that they didn't believe he'd ever learn. He
didn't believe it himself, and would have sworn to anything. So they
scraped together ten pounds for his passage, intermediate. He went
steerage and drank the difference. They'd sent on five pounds
capital to start him when he landed, and thought themselves very
clever. The first thing he did was to collar that capital and drink
it too. Then he went and worked in the store where he'd bought the
drink, for the sake of being near it--he loved it so. Then--this is
the queer part of the story--something happened. I won't tell you
what it was. It happened because it was the worst thing that could
have happened--it was bound to happen, owing to his luck. Whatever
it was it made him chuck drinking. He left the store where the stuff
was, and applied for a berth in a big business in Chicago. It was a
place where they didn't know him, else he wouldn't have got it.

"Then his luck turned. If it wasn't the same luck. Just because he
hadn't an object in life now--didn't care about drinking any longer,
nor yet about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so
hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money--he began to make
it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care
what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made
foreman--then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of
interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself,
but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay back his
mother and his sisters what they'd lost on him, besides making up
for any little extra trouble and expense he might have been to them.
He began putting dollars by just for that.

"I suppose you think that when he'd raked together enough dollars he
sent them home straightaway? Not he. He wasn't such a blamed idiot.
He knew it was no manner of good being in a hurry if you wanted to
do a thing in style. He pouched those dollars himself and bought a
small share in the business. He bought it for _them_, mind you.
You'd have thought, now he was inte