There never had been sweeter music to his ears than the voice of his son asking him to start immediately the legal forms of attaching all the Spellman property that they could find. With any other man Martin Moreland might have gone through a pretence of dreading to do this. With his son it was not necessary. He drew his lean hands across each other and moistened his lips. The malevolence of his smile he made no effort to conceal.
“Ten years is a long time,” he said in his cold, incisive voice, “to put into the building up of a structure, and it’s twice as long when it must be put into the tearing down. The care used in building is not necessary in demolition. We will now pull the underpinnings from Mahlon Spellman, his sweet wife, Elizabeth, and the precious darling, and we’ll watch them topple and fall.”
That afternoon father and son, ostentatiously accompanied by the sheriff, went to the dry-goods store. As they approached the door upon which the official was to nail the notice of attachment, they were amazed to see heavy streamers of black crêpe fluttering from it, and they learned for the first time, that while they had been closeted with their lawyer working out details of the business, Mahlon Spellman had escaped them. They would never have the pleasure of seeing him with his heart broken and his proud body bowed. If they ever saw him again, it would be when the dignity of death had set its ennobling mask upon his features.
The groan that broke from the lips of Martin Moreland was taken by the sheriff to be the product of compassion. He looked at him curiously. He had thought he was a man who would enjoy the business with which he was occupied.
His voice was softened to sympathy as he said: “I supposed you knew. They say it was heart trouble, that he’d been bad with it for a year, but he was too proud to let any one know.”
It was the elder Moreland who reached a detaining hand, saying: “We’d better defer this business till after the funeral.”
It was Junior, his handsome face sharpened to wolf-like lines, who said tersely: “Brace up, Dad. You’ve always told me that business was business. It’s too bad about the old man, but what’s it got to do with us? If this doesn’t turn the trick, nothing will. Nail it up!”
The sheriff was shocked. He protested. Martin Moreland ordered him to tack the notice above the crêpe on the store door, but to delay placing the one upon the residence until after the funeral.
As they turned away, Junior remarked: “I didn’t think you were so chicken-hearted, Dad. Why don’t you go through with it? Why don’t you give them all that’s coming to them at once?”
Martin Moreland walked in silence for a minute. Then he said quietly: “Junior, did you ever hear of a boomerang? It’s supposed to be a weapon that you throw at some one else with the knowledge that it may miss its mark and return and bury itself in your own heart. There are plenty of people in this town who would be overjoyed at an opportunity to get their arrows into my heart. A wrong move in the present situation would in my judgment be risking the boomerang. It’s better to go slow, to make a pretence of sympathy and let the law, which happens to be inevitable once it starts, and inexorable under headway, do the remainder for us.”