"Damn shame to do this," Wall flirted one hand toward the untidy logged-off ground.
Rod shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll give you two hundred thousand for Dent Island just as it stands," Wall offered abruptly. "Take your outfit and go log somewhere else. Two hundred thousand cash."
Rod looked at him. A hundred and fifty thousand would shift his last burden. That was the maximum he could realize from his timber, if he sheared Dent Island as a farmer shears his sheep's fleece in the spring. And with the forest stripped, Dent Island had no money value. It would consist only of an old stone house standing gaunt amid a few acres of grass, its background a stony stump-littered waste. Whatever associations Hawk's Nest had for him and his could be less than nothing to John P. Wall. What stirred the man? Had his iron bowels been moved to compassion? Was he obliquely trying to make amends? Or did he think that by purchase he could put on the intangible mantle the Norquays had woven about themselves in five generations?
Rod smiled wanly.
"Why should you wish to buy Hawk's Nest at more than its market value? Does your conscience hurt?"
"Conscience?" A flicker of expression crossed Wall's heavy face. "No. Don't use it in my business. Took a notion to the place. Always did like it. That's all. You're destroying it."
A glow of anger began to burn in Rod, and mixed with it a detached wonder at the type of man before him. He could imagine Wall viewing him with impersonal pity, and brushing him aside in pursuit of his own ends. There was a pachydermous quality in the man. He couldn't be hurt. He had no qualms. For him the world of humanity was not made up of men and women who had good impulses or bad ones, wisdom and folly, conditioned by many things. No, to him the world was made up of two kinds of people; those who could get what they wanted and those who couldn't. For Wall there were no fine distinctions, no ethical hazards in which a man might lose his soul. The firm grasp, the unrelenting hold, justified itself. Anything profitable was good business; anything unprofitable was bad business. Rod looked at him and wondered if Wall carried that remorseless philosophy into his social life, his family life; if he applied it to his pleasure, and in what degree. And if he did whether he found the balance in his life's ledger to lie on the credit or the debit side.
"You're reckoned wealthy, aren't you?" Rod said to him. "Three or four millions?"
"Something like that," Wall answered indifferently.