“Well, well, let her rattle, and get to pusiness,” Hans Wyker demanded. “Here’s Champers says he’s here yust for pusiness and he wants to get Aydelot and Carey, too.”
“Gentlemen!” Champers struck the table with his fist. “Let’s play fair now, so’s not to spoil each other’s games. 189 I’ll fix Aydelot if it’s in me to do it, just because he’s stood in my way once too often. But he’s my side line, him and Carey is. I’m here for business. Tell me what you are here for.”
Hans Wyker’s little eyes were red with pent-up anger and malice as he burst out:
“Shentlemen, you know my hart luck. You see where I be today. I not repeat no tiresome history here. Kansas yust boomin’! Wykerton dead! Yon Yacob own all der groun’ right oop to der corporation line on tree side, an’ he not sell one inch for attitions to dis town. He say dere notings to keep town goin’ in two, tree year. What we care? We be rich by den an’ let it go to der devil. But he not sell. Den I go mit you and we organize town company. We mark townsite, we make Grass River sell to us. We boom! boom! boom! We knock Careyville from de prairie alretty, mak’ Yon Yacob go back to Cincinnati where he belong mit his Chews. He damned queer Chew, but he Chew all de same all right, all right. I want to down Yon Yacob, an’ I do it if it take tree hundred fifty years. I’ll kill him if he get in my way. I hate him. He run me off my saloon in ol’ Carey Crossin’; my prewery goin’ smash mit der damned prohibittery law; he growin’ rich in Careyville, an’ me!”
His voice rose to a shriek and he stamped his foot in rage.
“Hold your noise, Wyker!” Champers growled. “Don’t you know who’s on the other side of that partition?”
“I built that partition mineself. It’s von dead noise-breaker,” Wyker began. But Champers broke in:
Dr. Carey had described Smith once as rather small, with close-set dark eyes and a stiff, half-paralyzed right arm and wrist, a man who wrote in a cramped left-handed style. There was a crooked little scar cutting across his forehead now above the left eye that promised to stay there for life. He had a way of evading a direct gaze, suggesting timidity. And when Hans Wyker had threatened to kill John Jacobs he shivered a little, and for the instant a gray pallor crept across his face, unnoted by his companions.
“We propose to start a town in the Grass River country that will kill Careyville. We two put up the capital. You do the buying and selling. We’ll handle real estate lively for a few months. We’ll advertise till we fill the place with buyers, and we’ll make our pile right there and then—and it’s all to be done by Darley Champers & Co. We two are not to be in the open in the game at all.”