Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ Jim got up and sat on a trunk to rest his cramped muscles. The walls of the narrow room began to oppress him, like the walls of a cell, and the little red wagon stood out, a very passion of color, in the gray of its surroundings. He could not escape it; it was a symbol of the joy of the past in the hopelessness of the present.
Jim turned his back to it and gazed down at the street. Men with dinner-buckets—the Sunday shift at the mill—were leaving the houses around, their hats drawn down, their coat-collars turned up around their ears. ”

“ Jim lifted his hat and passed on, black anger and jealousy in his heart. He knew the men; one of them—Hallowell, a mechanic like himself—had been his rival for Molly's favor, and had boasted that he would oust him yet. And so he swung along the street, his head down, seeing nothing of the crowd around, occupied always with the pictures conjured up by his own brooding fancy. ”

“ It was two hours later when Jim, after standing sullenly with a crowd in the pool-room down the street, came back through the market-place. The streets were less crowded now; the late buyers had gone home with their baskets; the sleepy babies were tucked in their beds; the butchers, after twenty hours of work, had shut up their stands and gone away. Molly had disappeared, and the percentage of drunkards among the corner loafers had increased. Then Jim saw Hallowell.
“RUN! GET OUT, QUICK! HE'S DEAD!” ”