He turned sharply and disappeared about the corner of the dwelling. Gordon moved to watch him stride up the slope to where a horse was tied by the public road. Crandall swung himself into the saddle, brought his heels savagely into the horse's sides, and clattered over the road.

Gordon Makimmon's annoyance quickly evaporated; he thought with a measure of amus.e.m.e.nt of the impetuous young man who was not content to grow a crop of fodder. If the men of Greenstream all resembled Edgar Crandall, he realized, the Cannons would have an uneasy time. He thought of the brother, Alexander, of Alexander's wife, who resembled Lettice, and determined to drive soon to the Bottom and see them and the farm. He would have to make a practicable arrangement with regard to the latter, secure his intention, avoid question, by a nominal scheme of payment.

VII

He knew, generally, where Alexander Crandall's farm lay; and, shortly after, drove through the village and mounted the road over which plied the Stenton stage. In the Bottom, beyond the east range, he went to the right and pa.s.sed over an ill-defined way with numerous and deep fords. It was afternoon; an even, sullen expanse of cloud hid the deeps of sky through which the sun moved like a newly-minted silver dollar. A sharp wind drew through the opening; the fallen leaves rose from the road in sudden, agitated whirling; the gaunt branches, printed sharply on the curtain of cloud, revealed the deserted nests of past springs.

He drove by solitary farms, their acres lying open and dead among the brush; and stopped, undecided, before a fenced clearing that swept back to the abrupt wall of the range, against which a low house was scarcely distinguishable from the sere, rocky ascent. Finally he drove in, over a faintly marked track, past a corner of the fence railed about a trough for sheep shearing, to the house. A pine tree stood at either side of the large, uncut stone at the threshold; except for a ma.s.sive exterior chimney the somberly painted frame structure was without noticeable feature.

He discovered immediately from the youthful feminine figure awaiting him at the door that he was not at fault. Mrs. Crandall's face radiated her pleasure.

"Mr. Makimmon!" she cried; "there's just no one we'd rather see than you.

Step right out, and Alexander'll take your horse. He's only at the back of the house.... Alec!" she called; "Alec, what do you suppose?--here's Mr.

Makimmon."

Alexander Crandall quickly appeared, in a hide ap.r.o.n covered with curlings of wood. A slight concern was visible upon his countenance, as though he expected at any moment to see revealed the "string" of which his brother had spoken.

Gordon adequately met his salutation, and turned to the woman. He saw now that she was more mature than Lettice: the mouth before him, although young and red, was bitten in at the corners; already the eyes gazed through a shadow of care; the capable hands were rough and discolored from toil and astringent soaps.

"Come in, come in," Crandall urged, striving to banish the sudden anxiety from his voice.

"And you go right around, Alec," his wife added, "and twist the head off that dominicker chicken. Pick some flat beans too, there's a mess still hanging on the poles. Go in, Mr. Makimmon."

He was ushered into the ceremonious, barely-furnished, best room. There was a small rag carpet at the door, with an archaic, woven animal, and at its feet an unsteady legend, "Mary's Little Lamb"; but the floor was uncovered, and the walls, sealed in resinous pine, the pine ceiling, gave the effect, singular and depressing, of standing inside a huge box.

"It's mortal cold here," Mrs. Crandall truthfully observed; "the grate's broken. If you wouldn't mind going out into the kitchen--"

In the kitchen, from a comfortable place by the fire, Gordon watched her deft preparations for an early supper. Crandall appeared with the picked dominicker, and sat rigidly before his guest.

"I don't quite make out," he at last essayed, "how you expect your money, what you want out of it."

"I don't want anything out of it," Gordon replied with an almost bitter vigor; "leastways not any premium. I said you could pay me when you liked.

I'll deed you the farm, and we'll draw up a paper to suit--to suit crops."

The apprehension in Alexander Crandall's face turned to perplexed relief.

"I don't understand," he admitted; "but I haven't got to. It's enough to know that you pulled us out of ruination. Things will come right along now; we can see light; I'm extending the sheep-cots twice."

Supper at an end he too launched upon the lack of opportunity in Greenstream. "Some day," he a.s.serted, "and not so far off either, we'll shake off the grip of these blood-money men; we'll have a state lawed bank; a rate of interest a man can carry without breaking his back.

There's no better land than the Bottom, or the higher clearings for grazing ... it's the men, some of 'em...."

VIII

It was dark when Gordon closed the stable door and turned to his dwelling.

A light streamed from a c.h.i.n.k in the closed kitchen shutter like a gold arrow shot into the night. From within came the long-drawn quaver of William Vibard's performance of the Arkansas Traveller. He was sitting bowed over the accordion, his jaw dropped, his eyes glazed with the intoxication of his obsession. Rose was rigidly upright in a straight chair, her hands crossed at the wrists in her meager lap.

The fluctuating, lamentable sounds of the instrument, Rose's expression of conscious virtue, were suddenly petty, exasperating; and Gordon, after a short acknowledgment of their greeting, proceeded through the house to the sitting room beyond.

No fire had been laid in the small, air-tight stove; the room had a closed, musty smell, and was more chill than the night without; his breath hung before him in a white vapor. Soon he had wood burning explosively, the stove grew rapidly red hot and the chill vanished. He saw beyond the lamp with its shade of minute, variously-colored silks the effigy of Mrs.

Hollidew dead. Undisturbed in the film of dust that overlaid the table stood a pink celluloid thimble ... Lettice had placed it there....

His thoughts turned to Alexander Crandall and his wife, to the extended sheep-cots, and the "light" which they now saw. He recalled the former's a.s.sertion that the land was all right, but that the blood-money men made life arduous in Greenstream. He remembered Edgar Crandall's arraignment of the County as "the littlest, meanest place on earth," a place where a man who wanted his own, his chance, was helpless to survive the avarice of a few individuals, the avarice for gold. He had asked him, Gordon Makimmon, to give him that chance. But, obviously, it was impossible ... absurd.

His memory drifted back to the evening in the store when Valentine Simmons had abruptly demanded payment of his neglected account, to the hopeless rage that had possessed him at the realization of his impotence, of Clare's illness. That scene, that bitter realization of ruin, had been repeated across the breadth of Greenstream. As a boy he had heard men in shaking tones curse Pompey Hollidew; only last week the red-headed Crandall had sworn he would let his ground rot rather than slave for the breed of Cannon. It was, apparently, a perpetual evil, an endless burden for the shoulders of men momentarily forgetful or caught in a trap of circ.u.mstance.

Yet he had, without effort, without deprivation, freed Alexander Crandall.

He could have freed his brother, given him the chance his rebellious soul demanded, with equal ease. He had not done that last, he had said at the time, because of the numbers that would immediately besiege him for a.s.sistance. This, he realized, was not a valid objection--the money was his to dispose of as he saw fit. He possessed large sums lying at the Stenton banks, automatically returning him interest, profit; thrown in the scale their weight would go far toward balancing the greed of Valentine Simmons, of Cannon.

He considered these facts totally ignorant of the fact that they were but the reflection of his own inchoate need born in the anguish of his wife's death; he was not conscious of the veering of his sensibility--sharpened by the hoa.r.s.e cry from the stiffening lips of Lettice--to the world without. He thought of the possibility before him neither as a scheme of philanthropy nor of revenge, nor of rehabilitation. He considered it solely in the light of his own experience, as a practical measure to give men their chance, their own, in Greenstream. The cost to himself would be small--his money had faded from his conceptions, his necessities, as absolutely as though it had been fairy gold dissolved by the touch of a magic wand. He had never realized its potentiality; lately he had ignored it with the contempt of supreme indifference. Now an actual employment for it occupied his mind.

The stove glowed with calorific energy; General Jackson, who had been lying at his feet, moved farther away. The lamplight grew faint and reddish, and then expired, trailing a thin, penetrating odor. In the dark the heated cylinder of the stove shone rosy, mysterious.

Gordon Makimmon was unaware of his own need; yet, at the antic.i.p.ation of the vigorous course certain to follow a decision to use his money in opposition to the old, established, rapacious greed, he was conscious of a sudden tightening of his mental and physical fibers. The belligerent blood carried by George Gordon Makimmon from world-old wars, from the endless strife of bitter and rugged men in high, austere places, stirred once more through his relaxed and rusting being.

He thought, aglow like the stove, of the struggle that would follow such a determination, a struggle with the pink fox, Valentine Simmons. He thought of himself as an equal with the other; for, if Simmons were practised in cunning, if Simmons were deep, he, Gordon Makimmon, would have no necessity for circuitous dealing; his course would be simple, unmistakable.--He would lend money at, say, three per cent, grant extensions of time wherever necessary, and knock the bottom out of the storekeepers' usurious monopoly, drag the farms out of Cannon's grasping fingers.

"By G.o.d!" he exclaimed, erect in the dark; "but Edgar Crandall will get his apples."

The dog licked his hand, faithful, uncomprehending.

IX

On an afternoon of mid-August Gordon was sitting in the chamber of his dwelling that had been formerly used as dining room. The table was bare of the castor and the red cloth, and held an inkpot, pens upright in a gla.s.s of shot, and torn envelopes on an old blotter. An iron safe stood against the wall at Gordon's back, and above it hung a large calendar, advertising the Stenton Realty and Trust Company.

A sudden gloom swept over the room, and Gordon rose, proceeded to the door. A bank of purple cloud swept above the west range, opened in the sky like a gigantic, menacing fist; the greenery of the valley was overcast, and a white flash of lightning, accompanied by a shattering peal of thunder, stabbed viciously at the earth. There was no rain. An edge of serene light followed in the west a band of saffron radiance that widened until the cloud had vanished beyond the eastern peaks. The sultry heat lay like a blanket over Greenstream.

He turned back into the room, but, as he moved, he was aware of a figure at the porch door. It was a man with a round, freshly-colored countenance, bland eyes, and a limp mustache, clad in leather boots and a worn corduroy gunning coat. Gordon nodded familiarly; it was the younger Entriken from the valley beyond.

"I came to see you about my note," he announced in a facile candor; "I sh'd take it up this month, but times are terrible bad, Gordon, and I wondered if you'd give me another extension? There's no real reason why you sh'd wait again; I reckon I could make her, but it would certainly be accommodating--" he paused interrogatively.

"Well," Gordon hesitated, "I'm not in a hurry for the note, if it comes to that. But the fact is ... I've got a lot of money laid out. What's been the matter?--the weather has been good, it's rained regular--"

"That's just it," Entriken interrupted; "it's rained too blamed regular.

It is all right for crops, but we've got nothing besides cattle, and steers wouldn't hardly put on anything the past weeks. Of course, in a way, gra.s.s is cattle, but it just seems they wouldn't take any good in the wet."

"I suppose it will be all right," Gordon Makimmon a.s.sented; "but I can hardly have the money out so long ... others too."