Read "A Romany of the Snows, Volume 5" by Gilbert Parker online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was no use: men might come and go before her, but Kitty Cline had eyes for only one man. Pierre made no show of liking her, and thought, at first, that hers was a passing fancy. He soon saw differently. There was that look in her eyes which burns conviction as deep as the furnace from which it comes: the hot, shy, hungering look of desire; most childlike, painfully infinite. He would rather have faced the cold mouth of a pistol; for he felt how it would end. He might be beyond wish to play the lover, but he knew that every man can endure being loved. He also knew that some are possessed -- a dream, a spell, what you will -- for their life long. Kitty Cline was one of these.
He thought he must go away, but he did not. From the hour he decided to stay misfortune began. Willie Haslam, the clerk at the Company's Post, had learned a trick or two at cards in the east, and imagined that he could, as he said himself, "roast the cock o' the roost" -- meaning Pierre. He did so for one or two evenings, and then Pierre had a sudden increase of luck (or design), and the lad, seeing no chance of redeeming the I O U, representing two years' salary, went down to the house where Kitty Cline lived, and shot himself on the door-step.