"On what?" Joe asked.
Elias Dorrance's shrug was half seen in the night. "Your mules, your harness, your wagon, your livestock, your household goods. You can cover it."
For a moment Joe stood blankly, the offer not even registering. Then a slow anger that mounted by leaps and bounds grew within him.
He'd been overwhelmed when Emma gave him the $600 and told him that, at last, he could have his farm. He still could not understand how she had saved such a vast sum; Joe had never earned $600 in any one year. But every penny of it, everything they had, represented the combined sweat and toil, and almost the life's blood, of Emma and himself. Joe thought of Nick Johnson.
He, too, had had a farm financed by Elias and he'd lost a crop. The next year he lost another, and Elias had taken everything except the clothes the Johnsons wore on their backs. Now hopeless and defeated, Nick Johnson was again a hired man and his courage was so broken that he never would be anything else. Joe thought of Emma's cherished household goods, the few things his children owned, of the mules, the cows, everything upon which Elias had no claim. For a moment he had a savage urge to smash his fist into the banker's face, and Elias must have sensed it for he took a backward step. Joe bit his words off and spat them out,
"Elias, you can take a long running jump into the nearest duck pond."
Without looking back and without entering the store, he turned and strode through the darkness toward his house. A man who turned his back on the land almost turned his back on God too. But one who risked everything his family had was not a man at all. Joe entered the house. Emma was sewing at the table and she looked up, and concern flooded her eyes.
"Was there nobody at the store?"
"I didn't go. I met Elias."
Emma waited expectantly. For a short space Joe strode up and down the floor. Then he turned to face her.