“Stamps is the little man with the cattle claim,” he commented to himself. “He comes from the neighbourhood of the Cross-roads. What letters could he have to hand over?”
And he began to dress, wondering vaguely.
Stamps had spent a sleepless night. He could not sleep because his last interview with Linthicum had driven him hard, even though he had been able to promise him the required five hundred dollars; he also could not sleep because the air of the city had been full of talk about the promising outlook of the De Willoughby claim. Over the reports he had heard, he had raged almost with tears.
“The Dwillerbys is ristycrats,” he had said. “They’re ristycrats, an’ it gives ’em a pull even if they was rebels an’ Southerners. A pore man ez works hard an’ ain’t nothin’ but a honest farmer, an’ a sound Union man ain’t got no show. Ef I’d been a ristycrat I could hev got inflooence ez hed hev pulled wires fur me. But I hain’t nothin’ but my loyal Union principles. I ain’t no ristycrat, an’ I never aimed to be none.”
The bitterness of his nervous envy would have kept him awake if he had had no other reason for being disturbed, but most of all he was sleepless, because he was desperately ill and in danger he knew nothing of. Cold and weeks of semi-starvation, anxiety, excitement, and drenched garments had done the little man to death, and he lay raging with fever and stabbed with pain at each indrawn breath, tossing and gasping and burning, but thinking only of Linthicum and the herds and the scraps of paper which were to bring him five hundred dollars. He was physically wretched, but even while he was racked with agonised fits of coughing and prostrated with pain it did not occur to him to think that he was in danger. He was too wholly absorbed in other thoughts. The only danger he recognised was the danger that there might be some failure in his plans—that Linthicum might give him up—that the parson might back out of his bargain, realising that after all letters unsigned save by a man’s Christian name were not substantial evidence. Perhaps he would not come at all; perhaps he would leave the city; perhaps if he came he would refuse to give more than half or quarter the sum asked. Then Linthicum would throw him over—he knew Linthicum would throw him over. He uttered a small cry like a tortured cat.
“I know he’ll do it,” he said. “I seen it in his eye yesterday, when he let out on me an’ said he was a-gettin’ sick of the business. I shed hev kept my mouth shut. I’d said too much an’ it made him mad. He’ll throw me over Monday mornin’ ef I don’t take him the money on Sunday.”
He ate nothing all through the day but lay waiting for the passing of the hours. He had calculated as to which post would bring the letter from Minty. He had written to tell her of the hiding-place in which he had kept the bits of paper safe and dry through all the years. She was to enclose them in a stout envelope and send them to him.
Through the long, dragging day he lay alone burning, gasping, fighting for his breath in the attacks of coughing which seemed to tear his lungs asunder. There was a clock in a room below whose striking he could hear each hour. Between each time it struck he felt as if weeks elapsed. Sometimes it was months. He had begun to be light-headed and to think queer things. Once or twice he heard a man talking in a croaking wail, and after a few minutes realised that it was himself, and that he did not know what he had said, though he knew he had been arguing with Linthicum, who was proving to him that his claim was too rotten to have a ghost of a chance. By the time the afternoon post arrived he was semi-delirious and did not know how it happened that he at last found himself holding Minty’s letter in his hand. He laughed hysterically when he opened it. It was all right. There were the two yellowed sheets of paper—small sheets, written close, and in a peculiar hand. He had often studied the handwriting, and believed if he had seen it again he should know it. It was small but strong and characteristic, though that was not what he had called it.
“Ef I’d hed more time an’ could hev worked it out more—an’ got him to write suthin’ down—I could hev hed more of a hold,” he said, plaintively, “but Linthicum wouldn’t give me no time.”