I’ll never forget the look he gave me. I’ll wager a good bit that the idea of such enormity on my part never came into his Kingsley consciousness till that moment. Even then he did not seem to be just sure that he understood.
“I don’t expect anything definite from you or her, Judge Kingsley, until I have made good in the world. But I do look to you to give me a square deal. That’s only what you owe to me, man to man.”
“I owe you money and I will pay it. There is no other sort of bargain between us.”
He stepped into his house and shut the door in my face.
In that damnable situation I was minded to follow him and have it out, even if I were obliged to expose him. However, if death were hovering over that house it was a sanctuary I could not invade. But bitter thoughts raged in me when I turned away; I only asked to be set right with Celene.
I understand that this part of my confession will elicit little sympathy for me from the casual reader who takes the comfortable view that the world is full of girls and if one does not swing low enough on the bough there’s always another within reach. But mine was the exceptional case where the first love had become an obsession and all my spirit of persistency was flaming in me. I have not figured out as yet whether the troubles into which my general persistency in all matters has slammed me overbalance the fruits it has brought to me—but I reckon, after all, I’ll have to take my hat off to my persistency. If I had been a quitter I would not have played the biggest game in my life—and I’m coming to that right soon.
Once more circumstances were forcing me, though I needed mighty little forcing, to leave Levant at that juncture in my affairs.
“Damn ’em!” I blazed out to Dodovah Vose when I stamped into the tavern, “I’ve got to show ’em! I’ll show ’em I can make good.”
He blinked at me.
“But you have shown ’em already,” he said. He thought, of course, that I was speaking about the general public in Levant. “And if I was in your place I wouldn’t give a dam what your uncle says to you.”