“Two dollars and a half!” echoed Mariposa in alarm, for a dollar was beginning to look larger to her than it ever had done before. “It was only a dollar.”
“A dollar!” he shouted. “A dollar for that load!”—pointing to the street—“say, you’ve got a gall!”
Mariposa flushed. She had never been spoken to this way before in her life. She leaned over the balustrade and said haughtily:
“Bring in my things, and when they’re up here I will give you the dollar you agreed upon.”
The man gave a loud, derisive laugh.
“That beats anything!” he said, and then roared through the door to his pard: “Say, she wants to give us a dollar for that load. Ain’t that rich?”
There was a moment’s silence in the hall. A vulgar wrangle was almost impossible to the girl at the juncture to which the depressing and hideous events of the last few weeks had brought her. Yet she had still a glimmer of spirit left, and her gorge rose at the impudent swindle.
“I won’t pay you two dollars and a half, and I will have my things,” she said. “Bring them up at once.”
The man laughed again, this time with an uglier note.
“I guess not, young woman,” he said, lounging against the balustrade. “I guess you’ll have to fork out the two fifty or whistle for your things.”