“You are determined?” asked Mr. Welliver, making one last effort.
“I’m determined to run my own business,” said Jim.
Mr. Welliver shrugged his erect and beautifully tailored shoulders.
“When you’ve got enough—” he began, suggestively, but did not trouble to finish the sentence.
“Glad to have met you, gentlemen,” Jim said. “I’m off for a walk to stir up enthusiasm for breakfast.”
A man who has to have his clothes wet through before he can recognize it is raining may succeed as a professor of Greek or as an artificer of a ditch, but he is not likely to elbow aside numerous captains of industry. Though unequipped with that which the proverb declares to be the best teacher, Jim Ashe did have in its proper place inside his skull a brain reasonably able to travel from patent cause to obvious effect, or to reach a conclusion that birds which flock together are likely to be similarly feathered. The height of stupidity for a man in Jim’s situation would have been not to speculate on the manifest acquaintance between Mr. Welliver, Michael Moran, and Justice of the Peace Frame. He was not guilty of that stupidity, and as he walked along the road whose hot sands had cooled under the summer moon, he speculated on the significance of their early morning meeting. His thoughts ran something to the effect that to a man up a tree it looked as if Mr. Welliver had allies in the very heart of the territory of the Ashe Clothespin Company.
Jim walked briskly past his mills, then turned into an inviting lane which led upward toward a wood-lot. Presently he turned again, to return cross-lots along the hypotenuse of the triangle. To do this it was necessary to surmount the first line of defense, a five-strand, barb-wire fence, then to climb a knoll surmounted by a lonely hickory-tree. From the top of this knoll Jim hoped to have a general view of the country and so to acquaint himself at a glance with the topography of his new home. He scrambled up, and reached the top breathless. The last dozen feet had been steep, hiding the tiny plateau at the peak from sight. Immediately he straightened up. He was made to feel that he was not wholly welcome—indeed, that he was decidedly an intruder, for frowning at him with black brows and sullen black eyes was the young woman at whom he had stared on the station platform.
Her expression was hostile. If eyes and compressed lips can speak, that young woman was saying peremptorily and not at all politely, “Get out!”
“I beg your pardon,” Jim panted. “I had no idea—?”
“You must have seen me,” she said, coldly.