“I’m not aiming at anything,” Gordon answered, “I’m just doing.”
“And there’s that Hagan that got five thousand from you, it’s an open fact about him. He came from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk, to get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment, of a kin in Greenstream and left for parts unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn’t love a fool.”
“I may be a fool as you see me,” Gordon contended stubbornly; “and the few liars that get my money may laugh. But there’s this, there’s this, Simmons—I’m not cursed by the dispossessed and the ailing and the plumb penniless. I don’t go to a man with his crop a failure on the field like, well—we’ll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand for his breath. I’ve put a good few out of—of Cannon’s reach. Did you forget that I know how it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps, call out my place for debt? Did you forget that I sat in this office while you talked of old Presbyterian friends and sold me into the street?”
“Incorrigible,” Valentine Simmons said, “incorrigible; no sense of responsibility. I had hoped Pompey’s estate would bring some out in you. But I should have known—it’s the Makimmon blood; you are the son of your father. I knew your grandfather too, a man that fairly insulted opportunity.”
“We’ve never been storekeepers.”
“Never kept much of anything, have you, any of you? You can call it what you’ve a mind to, liberality or shiftlessness. But there’s nothing saved by names. There: it seems as if you never got civilized, always contemptuous and violent-handed ... it’s the blood. I’ve studied considerable about you lately; something’ll have to be done for the good of all.”
“What is it you want of me?”
“Call in your bad debts,” the other promptly responded; “shake off the worthless lot hanging to your pocket. Put the money rate back where it belongs. Why, in days gone by,” Valentine Simmons chuckled, “seventy per cent wasn’t out of the way for a forced loan, forty was just so-so. Ah, Pompey and me made some close deals. Pompey multiplied his talents. The County was an open ledger to him.”
“Didn’t you ever think of the men who had to pay you seventy per cent?” Gordon asked, genuinely curious.
“Certainly,” Simmons retorted; “we educated them, taught ’em thrift. While you are promoting idleness and loose-living.... But this is only an opening for what I wanted to say.—I had a letter last week from the Tennessee and Northern people, the Buffalo plan has matured, they’re pushing the construction right along.”