Wint placed his chair just inside the door, and sat down. He and Kite were the only composed persons in the room. B. B. looked acutely embarrassed and uncomfortable; Chase was angry; Skinner was nervous; Routt’s ease was palpably assumed. And Amos was fumbling uncertainly with his black old pipe. He asked, when Wint came in:
“Your mother mind smoke in her sitting room?”
Wint said: “No; go ahead.” He filled his own pipe, and Amos sliced a fill from his plug and deliberately prepared his smoke and lighted it. Kite seemed in no hurry to begin. He had taken a letter or two and a slip of paper from his pockets and was studying them in silence. Wint thought he recognized that slip of paper. A check.... It seemed to him that a cold hand clutched his throat. He felt a sick sense of the hopelessness of it all; a sick despair. Not so much on his own account.
Kite at last looked around the room, and said importantly:
“Well, gentlemen!”
Wint’s father could be still no longer. He cried: “See here, Kite, what’s all this tomfoolery? What’s this nonsense? It’s an outrage. Be quick, or be gone. I’ve no time to waste.”
Kite looked at Chase; and then he looked at Wint and asked maliciously: “Do you bid me be gone, too, young man?”
Wint shook his head. “Say what you have to say,” he suggested; and there was a great weariness in his voice.
Kite nodded. “I mean to.” And to Chase: “You see, the young man understands it is in his interest to handle this thing among ourselves.”
“To handle what thing?” Chase demanded. Kite cleared his throat.