It had been evident to the employees of the bank that the attempted hold-up that Martin Moreland reported had upset his temper to quite as great extent as it had disfigured his head and his influential right hand. There was nothing soothing to the ragged Moreland nerves in Peter’s retort.
“I came in here,” said Martin Moreland, “to give you just fifteen minutes to get that scum of the brothel out of your store.”
Peter Potter cocked his head on one side and looked at Martin Moreland.
“Martin,” he drawled slowly, “ain’t you makin’ a fine, large mistake? Didn’t you forget to study your books before you came rampagin’ into my place of business? As I recollect, I don’t owe you a red cent. You ain’t even one of my reg’lar and influential customers. They’s only one bill on my books that I’m carryin’ in your name and tain’t anything I’m proud of. I could spare it without a mite of trouble. Before you undertake to run my business, go back and stick your nose well down in your own. I ain’t goin’ to turn Jason out, and if you undertake to bother him, I got this same private account, that I’m going to increase against you a little in about a minute, that’d look peculiar to the deacons of your church and to all and sundry. If it’s the same to you, I wish you’d step out the way of my reg’lar customers!”
Peter Potter swung his front door wide and held it open.
In rage too deep for speech, Martin Moreland turned and started from the grocery, but he was forced to stand aside, for at that minute, Rebecca Sampson, with a smile of youthful innocence on her face, bearing her white flag over her shoulder, filled the doorway.
She looked straight at Peter Potter, and as an evidence of a custom between them, she held out her white flag and Peter Potter bowed his bald, pink head and stepped under it with the kindliest kind of a “Good morning!” The change in his voice and in his manner broke the nerve of Martin Moreland, already at the breaking point. The oath he uttered was shocking. Startled, Rebecca pushed back her bonnet and looked up at him. A flash of loathing, of anger, crossed her face. She caught the white symbol to her breast and edged to the farthest possible distance from him permitted by the width of the store. She made her way back to where she was accustomed to being served, muttering imprecations upon the head of Martin Moreland that were quite equal to Martin’s best in strong provocation.
In the high tide of anger, he took one step toward her. The resistant force with which he came in arresting contact was nothing less than the sturdy frame of Peter Potter in defensive attitude. Peter looked up at Martin Moreland with fire in his eyes and a sneer on his lips.
“Get it through your pate,” he said tersely. “I’m one man out of a few in this town that’s not a mite afraid of you. If we come to a show down, I’ve got something to show that would interest the rest of the town, I vow! I’ve asked you once to leave my store; now I wish you’d do it!”
Martin Moreland rushed through the door and turned in the direction of the bank, where he collided with Jimmy Price. Jimmy, on his way to work, had been interested by the extremely arresting pictures presented by the windows of Peter Potter’s grocery that morning. Jimmy had started to work with the feeling that he was comfortably fed, and had discovered, as he viewed the display windows, that he was hungry. He found his mouth watering for half a dozen different things. With his feet planted widely apart and either hand at his waist band, he was giving himself over to the gustatory delight of imagining which feature of the window display he would most rather have served him piping hot in his wife’s best brand of cookery. With eyes of longing he was studying the pink ham, the blue-and-silver mackerel. He had almost decided that the mackerel, boiled free of salt, slightly browned in butter, with a baked potato and a cup of coffee, would be wholly satisfying, when he innocently resolved himself into the immovable force coming in contact with a movable body.