Gordon Makimmon, absorbed in the difficult and elusive calculations of his
indefinable project was unaware of the change wrought by their departure,
of the shifting of the year, the familiar acts and living about him. He
looked up abruptly from the road when Valentine Simmons, upon the platform
of the store, arrested his progress homeward.
Simmons' voice was high and shrill, as though time had tightened and dried
his vocal cords; his cheeks were still round and pink, but they were
sapless, the color lingered like a film of desiccated paint.
The store remained unchanged: Sampson, the clerk, had gone, but another,
identical in shirt sleeves upheld by bowed elastics, was brushing the
counters with a turkey wing; the merchandise on the shelves, unloaded from
the slow procession of capacious mountain wagons, flowed in endless,
unvaried stream to the scattered, upland homes.
Valentine Simmons took his familiar place in the glass enclosure,
revolving his chair to fix on Gordon a birdlike attention.
"As an old friend," he declared, "an old Presbyterian friend, I want to
lay some of my experience before you. I want to complain a little, Gordon;
I have the right ... my years, Pompey's associate. The fact is--you're
hurting the County, you're hurting the people and me; you're hurting
yourself. Everybody is suffering from your--your mistaken generosity. We
have all become out of sorts, unbalanced, from the exceptional condition
you have brought about. It won't do, Gordon; credit has been upset, we
don't know where we stand, or who's who; it's bad.
"I said you suffered with the rest of us, but you are worse off still. How
shall I put it?--the County is taking sad advantage of your,
er--liberality. There's young Entriken; he was in the store a little time
ago and told me that you had extended his note again. He thought it was
smart to hold out the money on you. There's not a likelier farm, nor
better conditioned cattle, than his in Greenstream. He could pay twenty
notes like yours in a day's time. I hate to see money cheapened like that,
it ain't healthy.
"What is it you're after, Gordon? Is it at the incorruptible, the
heavenly, treasure you're aiming? But if it is I'll venture this--that the
Lord doesn't love a fool. And the man with the talents, don't overlook
him."
"I'm not aiming at anything," Gordon answered, "I'm just doing."
"And there's that Hagan that got five thousand from you, it's an open fact
about him. He came from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk, to
get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment, of a kin in
Greenstream and left for parts unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn't love a
fool."
"I may be a fool as you see me," Gordon contended stubbornly; "and the few
liars that get my money may laugh. But there's this, there's this,
Simmons--I'm not cursed by the dispossessed and the ailing and the plumb
penniless. I don't go to a man with his crop a failure on the field like,
well--we'll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand for his breath. I've
put a good few out of--of Cannon's reach. Did you forget that I know how
it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps, call out my place for
debt? Did you forget that I sat in this office while you talked of old
Presbyterian friends and sold me into the street?"
"Incorrigible," Valentine Simmons said, "incorrigible; no sense of
responsibility. I had hoped Pompey's estate would bring some out in you.
But I should have known--it's the Makimmon blood; you are the son of your
father. I knew your grandfather too, a man that fairly insulted
opportunity."
"We've never been storekeepers."
"Never kept much of anything, have you, any of you? You can call it what
you've a mind to, liberality or shiftlessness. But there's nothing saved
by names. There: it seems as if you never got civilized, always
contemptuous and violent-handed ... it's the blood. I've studied
considerable about you lately; something'll have to be done for the good
of all."
"What is it you want of me?"
"Call in your bad debts," the other promptly responded; "shake off the
worthless lot hanging to your pocket. Put the money rate back where it
belongs. Why, in days gone by," Valentine Simmons chuckled, "seventy per
cent wasn't out of the way for a forced loan, forty was just so-so. Ah,
Pompey and me made some close deals. Pompey multiplied his talents. The
County was an open ledger to him."
"Didn't you ever think of the men who had to pay you seventy per cent?"
Gordon asked, genuinely curious.
"Certainly," Simmons retorted; "we educated them, taught 'em thrift. While
you are promoting idleness and loose-living.... But this is only an
opening for what I wanted to say.--I had a letter last week from the
Tennessee and Northern people, the Buffalo plan has matured, they're
pushing the construction right along."
"I intended to come to you about that."
"Well?"
"I ain't going on with our agreement."
Simmons' face exhibited not a trace of concern.
"I may say," he returned smoothly, "that I am not completely surprised. I
have been looking for something of the kind. I must remind you that our
partnership is a legal and binding instrument; you can't break it, nor
throw aside your responsibility, with a few words. It will be an expensive
business for you."
"I'm willing to pay with what I've got."
The other held up a palm in his familiar, arresting gesture. "Nothing of
that magnitude; nothing out of the way; I only wanted to remind you that a
compensation should follow your decision. It puts me in a very nice
position indeed. I gather from your refusal to continue the partnership
that you do not intend to execute singly the original plan; it is possible
that you will not hold the options against the coming of transportation."
"You've got her," Gordon declared; "I'm not going to profit seventy times
over, tie up all that timber, from the ignorance of men that ought to
rightly advantage from it. I--I--" Gordon rose to his feet in the
harassing obscurity of his need; "I don't want to make! I don't want to
take anything ... never again! I want--"
"You forget, unfortunately, that I am forced to be accessory to your--your
change of heart. I may say that I shall have to pay dearly for your--your
eleventh hour conversion. Timber will be--unsteady."
"Didn't you mention getting something out of it?"
"A mere detail to my effort, my time. What my timber will be worth, with
what you throw on the market hawking up and down ... problematic."
Gordon Makimmon hesitated, a plan forming vaguely, painfully, in his mind.
Finally, "I might buy you out," he suggested; "if you didn't ask too dam'
much. Then I could do as I pleased with the whole lot."
"Now that," Valentine Simmons admitted, dryly cordial, "is a plan worth
consideration. We might agree on a price, a low price to an old partner.
You met the Company's agents, heard the agreement outlined; a solid
proposal. And, as you say, with the timber control in your own hands, you
could arrange as you pleased with the people concerned."
He grew silent, enveloped in thought. Then:
"I'll take a hundred thousand for all the options I bought, for my
interest in the partnership."
"I don't know as I could manage that," Gordon admitted.
An unassumed astonishment marked the other's countenance. "Why!" he
ejaculated, "Pompey left an estate estimated at--" he stopped from sheer
surprise.
"Some of the investments went bad," Gordon continued; "down in Stenton
they said I didn't move 'em fast enough. Then the old man had a lot laid
out in ways I don't hold with, with people I wouldn't collect from. And
it's a fact a big amount's got out here lately. Of course it will come
back, the most part."
Simmons' expression grew skeptical.
"I know you too," Gordon added; "you'll want the price in your hand."
"I'm getting on," the storekeeper admitted; "I can't wait now."
"I don't know if I can make it," Gordon repeated; "it'll strip me if I
do."
Valentine Simmons swung back to his desk. "At least," he observed, "keep
this quiet till something's settled."
Gordon agreed.