“Maybe it ain't good business; but, just as one human being to another—”
“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then, as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps re-member something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and sixty—the year before the war broke out?”
“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got married too. I wasn't but just twenty-two years old then. But I don't get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What's the year eighteen-sixty got to do with you and me?”
“I'm coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight now, his eyes ashine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that year, Mr. Albritton?”
“I can't say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.
“Then, if you'll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now you listen to me!
“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he came through that gate.
“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you; and you yelled to him that he should get out—that you did not want to buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from him—just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.
“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming. And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs came—big, mean dogs—out from under your house.
“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting hurt him very much, and he cried out.