On three sides of the shaded plaza business was housed in modern comfort. In sharp contrast, all along the north, sprawled an unbroken, staring huddle of haphazard buildings—frame, brick and adobe, tall and squat jumbled together, broad fronted or pinched. At the riverward corner, massive, ill-kept but dominant still, was a great structure of gray-stone once the luckless home of Brown and Almandares.
Squalid, faded and time-stained, like Falstaff’s rabble of recruits, this long row struck sinister to the eye. Any stranger, seeing what blight had fallen ominous and threatening all about him, seeing on door after door the same repeated name, might well guess the whole ugly story. For this long, forlorn row housed Bennett’s General Stores. Bennett sold everything but tunnels.
Here was Neighbor’s nearest errand. After a little delay he was shown into the great man’s private office.
Bennett turned slowly in his revolving chair; a tall spare man, with a thin straggle of sandy hair and a sharp, narrow face, close-shaven; which might have been a pleasant face but for a pinched and cruel mouth, a mean, pinched nose, and a shifty eye.
Here arose a curious contradiction. The man had held the whip hand for years, his conscious manner was overbearing and arrogant, but his eyes betrayed him, and all the unconscious lines of his face were slinking and furtive. He now wore an austere frown.
“Mr. Jones, I hear you have been gambling.”
“Oh, si!” said Mr. Jones; and he made those simple words convey enthusiasm, brightness and joy. “And—but, also, what do you suppose I hear about you? Give you three guesses.”
“What!” Bennett gasped incredulously; he crashed his fist down on the desk. “How about that mortgage?”
Jones beamed triumphant.
“You see? You don’t like it yourself—meddlin’, pryin’ and loose talk.”