“What’s the joke, Uncle Horace?” asked Oliver calmly.
“Joke? There’s no joke about it. You know what I mean. I demand an apology for what you said in the letter you wrote in reply to mine of the twenty-seventh inst.”
“Do you expect me to print my letter in the newspapers together with the apology?”
“That isn’t necessary, young man.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Oliver, unruffled. “I’ll agree to publish your letter to me and my reply, and I’ll follow them up with an apology for mine if you’ll apologize to me for yours. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Don’t beat about the bush,” snapped Mr. Gooch. “Don’t get fresh, young man. I’m not here to bandy words with you. I wrote you a very plain and dignified letter in which I told you what I thought of the underhanded way you acted in regard to those dear old ladies, Mrs. Bannester and her sister. You know as well as I do that it was my intention to restore their property to them, absolutely tax free and without a single claim against it. You simply sneaked in and got ahead of me, and now you are giving people to understand that I meant to foreclose on ’em and turn them out of house and home. You—”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Oliver, looking at his watch again, “I know that’s what you said in your letter—that and a lot of other things, Uncle Horace.”
“And what did you say in reply to my simple, straightforward letter? You said you wouldn’t trust me as far as you could throw a locomotive with one hand, or something like that. You said—”
“Yes, I know I said that—and a lot of other things too. You don’t have to repeat what I said. I’ve got a copy of the letter in my desk. It wasn’t a very long letter, for that matter, and I can recall every word of it. Do you want to continue this discussion, Uncle Horace? If you’ll look around you will see that quite a little crowd is collecting. Don’t you think you’d better drop the matter right here and now?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t care how big a crowd there is. The bigger the better, far as I’m concerned. If I don’t have a written and published acknowledgment from you that you deliberately misrepresented me, that you played me an underhanded trick simply for political purposes, I’ll—I’ll—”