And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white and then to red again.
“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four hundred dollars. I loan it to you—without security; and to-day I fix up those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you—more and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”
He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:
“I ask you again—please go away!”
When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.
“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what made him give that man the money?”
The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.
“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin mebbe when you're a little older the answer'll come to you.”
And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.