_Nick Perkins the Money Lender._
There is in every rural community one individual who in himself
represents an institution hated alike by the rich and poor, a necessary
evil, so to speak, and one for whom the law has had to define the
limits to which he may carry his questionable practices. The going and
coming of such a man in the community in which he lives is tolerated by
one class of residents who are familiar with his tactics, because of
the fear that some day they may be compelled to ask assistance from him.
There is yet another class of the same populace by whom he is called
a great and good man; it is because of the power and influence the
possession of wealth has put in his hand, which he uses for his own
selfish advancement. Although these same people may at the very time
be paying him usury rates upon a valuation not half the true worth of
security, should they ask for a further advance, this suave citizen,
parading under the guise of a public benefactor, refuses them, and
continues subtly after the blight is upon them to weave his drag net
closer about the unwary victims, strangling them at last; then with a
well-feigned show of reluctance, he gathers in their property, which he
has obtained at one-half its correct value.
Nicholas Perkins was the worthy exponent of this system in the Arcadian
district of which we are writing, and it was from him, through his
friend, the lawyer, that Cameron secured the loans of money for which
both his farm and that of his brother were pledged.
Perkins lived over at The Gore, and through his office, as Government
tax collector for the county, he was afforded an excellent opportunity
to know of the business affairs of the people within his jurisdiction.
As a farmer at The Gore he was known to be prosperous. As a money
lender, there were many, both in his own town and through the county,
who had occasion to know of his shrewd bargaining, and as a Government
agent for the collection of the land-holders’ dues, his promptness and
diligence were unquestioned. He drove about the county in an open-back
light wagon, drawn by a bob-tailed, cream-colored nag. Behind the seat
a rope halter was traced diagonally across from side to side, fastening
to the iron braces which gave it support. A slightly corpulent man
was Perkins, and while jogging along the country roads his favorite
position was on the edge of the seat, one hand grasping the reins at
which he tugged at frequent intervals, and the other holding the iron
braces surmounting the seat’s back. He wore a faded brown derby hat,
and a few scattered reddish side-whiskers adorned his face. There was
no mustache which should have been there to hide the stingy, straight
lips, and an insinuating smile from which the children invariably
shrank played at the corners of his mouth.
A social call from Nick Perkins was not taken as a pleasant surprise
in any of the homes throughout the county, and least of all in those
of the families at the rival town to his own, The Front. Perkins had a
very bad way about him, the neighbors said, because of the circumstance
that when a note he held—or it might be a mortgage upon a farm—was
overdue, they were sure to see the cream-colored, bob-tailed nag and
its owner driving slowly past, taking note of the condition of the land
and out-buildings. They said he counted the fence-rails so that he
would be sure they were all there when he got possession. Close with
his family and servants, a gift for charity’s sake would have been
considered a huge joke with him. A diversion in which he seemed most
to delight was that of keeping alive the dissensions existing between
the farmers of his own village and those whose lands met the river at
The Front. He was not a participator in any of their Saturday night
brawls,—not he,—and but for the suave, insinuating remarks he dropped
artfully in the hearing of certain ones at the two towns, their feuds
would long before have died out for lack of fuel.
The rebuff administered to Perkins by Bill Blakely before the smithy
had smouldered in his mind, not dying out, but fanned by more recent
reverses to his plans till it had now blazed upward, determining to
consume for his personal satisfaction and the discomfiture of The
Front, the Camerons’ homesteads. With the head of the family away, and
no news of him in nearly two years, Laughing Donald unable at any time
to contend against him for his rights, and the stock and dairy sold
from the farms, he had figured, despite the fact that Barbara, the wife
of Andy Cameron, had paid the interest money promptly, that there could
be very little money left, and in a month more he himself would be in
possession. Thus he argued, but he reckoned alone and without a friend
of the absent Cameron, who lived a short distance from the smithy,
and to whose words of caution the self-important Perkins had given no
hearing.
Almost daily now since the beginning of the month which marked the
end of the two years of the mortgage and the absence of Cameron, Nick
Perkins and his horse and buggy, known to every school child in the
country, drove along The Front. Turning upon the edge of his seat,
his disengaged arm extended along the brace surmounting its back, he
would deliberately look about him with that insolent proprietary air
so common among men of his class. Barbara Cameron witnessed this scene
for about a week. Laughing Donald, in his innocent way, had come over
from his place and inquired of her if she had any business with Nick
Perkins, because, he said, he drove past so often, he thought he might
have some “dealin’s with her.”
[Illustration]
The next day Andy’s Dan, simple-minded, but scenting trouble when he
saw Perkins drive past, hurried down to the gate at the road, and
closed and latched it securely. Inside of the house at the kitchen
table sat the silent figure of Barbara. Spread out before her was a map
of the British Columbias, showing the ranges of the Rocky Mountains.
Two years before, her husband had studied the same map, and hundreds
of times within the last few weeks she had pointed out to herself the
mountain passes through which he said he would journey in going to the
gold fields. For the thousandth time the thought came to her, Was he
dead? If he were alive and had found the hidden treasures he would have
returned to her before now. The cruel rumors which had reached her from
the neighbors that her husband had deserted her, she never allowed a
place in her troubled mind. If dead, she argued, then she could not
live there and see the poverty which must come to their families. She
would be happier to live anywhere else. Yes, happier to know for a
certainty that he was dead.
Then the thought had come into her mind in a more definite form,—Why
not go to him? Perhaps, too, Andy were sick. A new thought this. A
strange light was now in the eyes of Barbara. Sickness she herself had
ever known, but the possibility of her husband’s robust constitution
succumbing to disease she had never imagined. Again she said over in
her mind. “He may have been on the way home. He may be lying with a
fever in one of those camps in the mountain passes he told me about,
which is here on the map.”
In her excitement she arose and paced the floor: her features, set and
always stern, were now drawn hard. Looking from the window down to the
road, there she saw Nick Perkins passing, and looking, as she was able
to tell her husband later, as though he owned the farm already. She
stopped in the middle of the floor. With a quick movement she untied
the strings to her gingham apron, hung it on the peg by the kitchen
stove, told Dan to watch the biscuits baking in the oven, then retired
to her room. Soon she reappeared. Dan saw she had put on her Sunday
bonnet and her best frock. She held a tightly-rolled bundle under her
arm. Glancing quickly at the clock, as though her time was short, she
hurriedly told Dan to care for their one cow, and when he needed more
biscuits, to go down to Laughing Donald’s. Then, casting another hasty
glance around the rooms of the house, she went out at the back door and
down the road which led to the station.
Dan did not watch her going. He knew where she had gone.
[Illustration]