A Dog's Ransom
A Dog's Ransom
“He was not sure he would send it. He wrote many letters that he didn’t send to people. Simply writing the letters gave him pleasure. After writing “NEW YORK” at the top of the page, he rested his elbow, pen aloft, and gazed into space, vaguely smiling.
He was a short man of fifty-one, chunky but in good health. He limped, however, on his right foot. Four years ago the drum of a cement-mixer had fallen on his instep, breaking the metatarsals, and further complications had caused the amputati...on of his great toe and the toe next to it. For this reason Kenneth got two hundred and sixty dollars per month: he had been a semi-skilled laborer in construction work, good at pipe-laying, a good foreman in the sense that some men are good army sergeants though they may never rise higher. Kenneth had been lucky in claiming, via his lawyer, a skilled status with promise of immediate advancement when the accident had happened, so his compensation had been generous. But now Kenneth could never again (he thought with a kind of pride, self-pity and curious glory) jump about spryly on scaffoldings as he had once done, and for this he had been rightly recompensed.MoreLess
He was a short man of fifty-one, chunky but in good health. He limped, however, on his right foot. Four years ago the drum of a cement-mixer had fallen on his instep, breaking the metatarsals, and further complications had caused the amputati...on of his great toe and the toe next to it. For this reason Kenneth got two hundred and sixty dollars per month: he had been a semi-skilled laborer in construction work, good at pipe-laying, a good foreman in the sense that some men are good army sergeants though they may never rise higher. Kenneth had been lucky in claiming, via his lawyer, a skilled status with promise of immediate advancement when the accident had happened, so his compensation had been generous. But now Kenneth could never again (he thought with a kind of pride, self-pity and curious glory) jump about spryly on scaffoldings as he had once done, and for this he had been rightly recompensed.MoreLess
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