“I didn’t come here to ask questions,” the other quickly assured him; “but to borrow four thousand dollars.”
“Why not forty?” Gordon asked dryly.
“Because I couldn’t put it out at profit, now.” Edgar Crandall ignored the other’s factitious manner: “but I can turn four over two or three times in a reasonable period. I can’t give you any security, everything’s covered I own; that’s why I came to you.”
“You heard I was a fool with some money?”
“You didn’t ask any security of Alexander,” he retorted. “No, I came to you because there was something different in what you did from all I had ever known before. I can’t tell what I mean; it had a—well, a sort of big indifference about it. It seemed to me perhaps life hadn’t got you in the fix it had most of us; that you were free.”
“You must think I’m free—with four thousand dollars.”
“Apples,” the other continued resolutely. “I’ve got the ground, acres of prime sunny slope. I’ve read about apple growing and talked to men who know. I’ve been to Albermarle County. I can do the same thing in the Bottom. Ask anybody who knows me if I’ll work. I can pay the money back all right. But, if I know you from what you did, that’s not the thing to talk about now.
“I want a chance,” he drove a knotted fist into a hardened palm; “I want a chance to bring out what’s in me and in my land. I want my own! The place came to me clear, with a little money; but I wasn’t content with a crop of fodder. I improved and experimented with the soil till I found out what was in her. Now I know; but I can’t plant a sapling, I can’t raise an apple, without binding myself to the Cannons and Hollidews of the County for life.
“I’d be their man, growing their fruit, paying them their profits. They would stop at the fence, behind their span of pacers, and watch me—their slave—sweating in the field or orchard.”
“You seem to think,” Gordon observed, “that you ought to have some special favor, that what grinds other men ought to miss you. Old Pompey sold out many a better man, and grabbed richer farms. And anyhow, if I was to money all that Cannon and Valentine Simmons got hold of where would I be?—Here’s two of you in one family, in no time at all.... If that got about I’d have five hundred breaking the door in.”