"Aye, you will," said the old man, bitterly. "You've let him wring you properly. McNab's got no reason to love me and you know it ... but he did the square thing this time—if he never did it in his life before, telling me I was being robbed by my own son."
"I'd advise you, father, not to talk that way," Davey's temper was rising. "I wanted money; you wouldn't have given it to me if I'd asked for it. I had to get it. McNab lent it to me. He said I could pay him by and by, and that it was good enough—being Cameron's son—to borrow money on. He said you'd never see these receipts I gave him."
"Well, you'll borrow no more," Donald Cameron breathed. "Johnson can take charge of things till I'm about again. And before you make an arrangement of this kind again you'll perhaps wait till I'm dead and buried. I'll have it posted in the Wirree that no one is to serve you with drink unless you pay for it."
"If you do that—" Davey began.
"What I regret is that I didn't give Johnson charge of things from the first," the old man continued. "But I set my own son before him. You've shown y' weren't fit for the trust—snaring me on a level with gaol birds...."
Davey's voice trembled with passion.
"I haven't snared you!" he cried, "I haven't taken what wasn't my own. Isn't what's yours, mine? Haven't you always said so? Isn't that what you've said when I've asked for wages and you've said: 'No!' Haven't you said that it will be all mine some day—this place and all the money you've made? Who else have you got to give it to? I've only been doing with the money what you ought to have done. I've spent some of it so as not to have us shamed in the country."
"Oh, that's it, is it?" Donald Cameron's grey eyes gleamed beneath their shaggy brows. "The son's to make ducks and drakes of the fortune the father earns by the sweat of his brow. Well, I'll tell you this much, Davey, you'll not get a penny of my money to throw to the winds. If you were a good son, a hardworking, industrious lad, y' might be sure of it, but if you were fifty times flesh of my flesh, you'd not get a penny to go to the devil with."
"Donald! Donald!" Mary Cameron laid a hand on her husband's coat. "Don't speak to the boy like that," she cried. "You know he's a good lad, that he's worked hard for years."
He pushed her away.