“Nobody knows better than you do,” he said, finding increased self-control with every word, now that the first excitement was over, “that a great deal of money has been made in that firm of yours. I shall be glad to investigate the conditions under which the business has contrived to make you rich and your partner poor.”
Mr. Tenney seemed disagreeably surprised at this tone. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said with passing asperity. “Of course you’re welcome. The books are open to you. If a man makes four thousand dollars and spends seven thousand dollars, what on earth has his partner’s affairs to do with it? I live within my income and attend to my business, and he doesn’t do either. That’s the long and short of it.”
The two men talked together on this subject for a considerable time, Horace alternating between expressions of indignation at the fact that his father had become the unedifying tail of a concern of which he once was everything, and more or less ingenious efforts to discover what way out of the difficulty, if any, was offered. Mr. Tenney remained unmoved under both, and at last coolly quitted the topic altogether.
“You ought to do well here,” he said, ignoring a point-blank question about how General Boyce’s remaining interest could be protected. “Thessaly’s going to have a regular boom before long. You’ll see this place a city in another year or two. We’ve got population enough now, for that matter, only it’s spread out so. How did you come to go in with Tracy?”
“Why shouldn’t I? He’s the best man here, and starting alone is the slowest kind of slow work.”
Mr. Tenney smiled a little, and put the tips of his fingers together gently.
“Tracy and I don’t hitch very well, you know,” he said. “I took a downright fancy to him when I first came in from Sidon Hill, but he’s such a curious, touchy sort of fellow. I asked him one day what church he’d recommend me to join; of course I was a stranger, and explained to him that what I wanted was not to make any mistake, but to get into the church where there were the most respectable people who would be of use to me; and what do you think he said? He was huffed about it—actually mad! He said he’d rather have given me a hundred dollars than had me ask him that question; and after that he was cool, and so was I, and we’ve never had much to say to each other since then. Of course, there’s no quarrel, you know. Only it strikes me he’ll be a queer sort of man to get along with. A lawyer with cranks like that—why, you never know what he’ll do next.”
“He’s one of the best fellows alive,” said Horace, with sharp emphasis.
“Why, of course he is,” replied Mr. Tenney. “But that isn’t business. Take the General, for instance; he’s a good fellow, too—in a different kind of way, of course—and see where it’s landed him. The best fellow is No. 1. Look out for him and you are all right. Tracy might be making five or six times as much as he is, if he went the right way to work. He does more business and gets less for it than any other lawyer in town. There’s no sense in that.”
“Upon my word, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, after a moment’s pause, in which he deliberately framed what he was going to say, “I find it difficult to understand why you thought it worth while to come here at all to-day: it surely wasn’t to talk about Tracy; and the things I want to know about my father you won’t discuss. What do you want, anyway? Wait a moment, let me finish. What I see is this: that you were a private in the regiment my father was colonel of; that he made you a sort of adjutant, or something in the nature of a clerk, and so lifted you out of the ranks; that during the war, when your health failed, he gave you a place in his business here at home, which lifted you out of the farm; that a while later he made you a partner; and that gradually the tables have been completely turned, until you are the colonel and he is the private, you are rich and he is nearly insolvent. That is what the thing sums up to in my mind. What is your view of it? He was good to you. Have you come to tell me that now you are going to be good to him?”