“He sent it by me,” Horace Carey spoke up. “Business still keeping him busy. He’s a humane man.”
“Up to a point he is,” John Jacobs broke in. “Let’s be fair. He is a large-sized boomer and a small-sized rascal. A few deals won’t bear the light of day, but mainly they are inside the law. I’ve let him handle all but my grazing land around Wykerton. He’s done well by me. But he’s been at his line a quarter of a century and he’ll end where he began—in a real estate office over in Wykerton, trying to get something for nothing and calling it business.”
“Horace Carey?” Jim Shirley called next.
“Here,” Carey replied.
“With a big H,” Todd Stewart declared. “Same doctor of the old school. Why don’t you get married or take a trip to India, Doctor? Not that we aren’t satisfied all over with you as you are, though, and wouldn’t hear to your doing either one. You belong to all of us now.”
“I may have a call to a bigger practice some day, a service that will make you proud of your former honorable townsman. At present I’m satisfied,” Carey said, with a smile.
Four years later the men remembered this reply and the attractive face of the speaker, the sound of his voice, and the whole magnetic presence of the man.
“John Jacobs?” Shirley called next.
“The merchant prince of Careyville,” Asher Aydelot declared. “The money-loaning Shylock. Didn’t let the boom so much as turn one hair black or white. Land owner and stock raiser of the Wolf Creek Valley and 220 hater of saloons seven days in the week. Whatever it may mean in New York and Cincinnati and Chicago, being a Jew means being a gentleman in this corner of Kansas,” Asher was running on, till John Jacobs threw a chair cushion at his head and Jim called out:
“Cyrus Bennington.”