David knew what was coming, or imagined he did, and felt sick at heart.
“Yes?” he queried.
“I guess you know as well as I do how I hate to say anything about money,” said Herwig, “and you know I wouldn't if I wasn't so hard put to it I don't know which way to turn. I don't want you to worry about it. If it ain't convenient just you forget I ever said anything. Fact is I'm so pressed for money I'm worried to death. The wholesalers I get my goods of—”
“My bill is much larger than it should be,” said David. “I have let it run longer than I have any right to. Just at this moment—”
“I wouldn't even speak of it if I wasn't so put to it to satisfy those I owe,” said Herwig apologetically. “I thought maybe you might be able to help me out somehow, but I don't want to put you to any trouble.”
He was evidently sincere.
“My wholesalers are threatening to close me out,” he said, “and I've just got to try every way I can to raise some cash. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't dun a good customer, let alone you, Mr. Dean.”
“I know it, Brother Herwig,” David said. “You have been most lenient. I am ashamed. I will see what I can do.”
The old grocer followed him to the door, still protesting his regret, and David turned up the street to do the thing he disliked most of anything in the world—ask his trustees for a further advance on his salary.
Already he was overdrawn by several hundred dollars, and he was as deeply ashamed of this as he was of his debts to the merchants of Riverbank. It had always been his pride to be “even with the world”; he felt that no man had a right to live beyond his means—“spending to-morrow to pay for to-day,” he called it—and he had worried much over his accumulating debts. That very morning, before he had left his manse, he had made out a new schedule of his indebtedness, and had been shocked to see how it had grown since his trustees had made the last advance he had asked. With the advance the trustees had allowed him, the total was something over a thousand dollars. He still owed something on last winter's coal; he owed a goodly drug bill; his grocery bill was unpaid since the first of the year; he owed the butcher; the milkman had a bill against him; there were a dozen small accounts for shoes, drygoods, one thing and another.