Rita began to cry and rose from her chair, intending to leave the room, but her mother detained her.
"Sit down!" she commanded. "At least you shall hear of the trouble you bring upon us. I have been thinking of a plan, and maybe you can help us carry it out if you want to do anything to help your father and brother. As for myself, I don't care. I am always willing to suffer and endure. 'Blessed are they that suffer, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.'"
Tom pricked up his ears, Tom, Sr., put down his knife and fork to listen, and Rita again took her seat at table.
"Billy Little has plenty of money," continued Mrs. Margarita, addressing her daughter. "The old skinflint has refused to lend it to your father or Tom, but perhaps he'll not refuse you if you ask him. I believe the old fool is in love with you. What they all want with you I can't see, but if you'll write to him—"
"Oh, I can't, mother, I can't," cried Rita, in a flood of tears.
I will not drag the reader through another scene of heart failure and maternal raving. Rita, poor girl, at last surrendered, and, amid tears of humiliation, wrote to Billy Little, telling of her father's distress, her mother's commands, and her own grief because she was compelled to apply to him. "You need not fear loss of your money, my friend," she wrote, honestly believing that she told the truth. "You will soon be repaid. Mr. Williams is demanding money from my father and Uncle Jim, and I dislike, for many reasons well known to you, to be under obligations to him. If you can, without inconvenience to yourself, lend this money, it will help father greatly just at this time, and will perhaps save me from a certain frightful importunity. The money will be repaid to you after harvest, when collections become easier. If I did not honestly believe so, even my mother's commands would not induce me to write this letter."
Rita fully believed the money would be paid; but Billy knew that if he made the loan, he would be throwing his money away forever.
After making good Dic's loss of twenty-six hundred dollars,—which sum, you may remember, went to Bays,—Little had remaining in his strong-box notes to the amount of two thousand dollars, which, together with his small stock of goods and two or three hundred dollars in cash, constituted the total sum of his worldly wealth. He had reached a point in life where he plainly saw old age staring him in the face—an ugly stare which few can return with equanimity. The small bundle of notes was all that stood between him and want when that time should come "sans everything." But Williams was staring Rita in the face, and if the little hoard could save her, she was welcome to it.
Billy's sleep the night after he received Rita's letter was meagre and disturbed, but next morning he took his notes and his poor little remainder of cash and went to Indianapolis. He discounted the notes, as he had done in Dic's case, and with the proceeds he went to the store of Fisher and Bays. Fisher was present when Billy entered the private office and announced his readiness to supply the firm with twenty-three hundred dollars on their note of hand. The money, of course, being borrowed by the firm, went to the firm account, and was at once applied by Fisher upon one of the many Williams notes. Therefore Tom's "overdrafts" remained in statu quo; likewise the penitentiary.
The payment of Billy Little's twenty-three hundred dollars upon the Williams debt did not help matters in the least. The notes owed by the firm of Fisher and Bays to the Williams house aggregated nearly fourteen thousand dollars, and Billy's poor little all did not stem the tide of importunity one day, although it left him penniless. The thought of his poverty was of course painful to Billy, but he rode home that evening without seeing Rita, happy and exultant in the mistaken belief that he had helped to save her from the grasp of Williams.