Thomas Smith sat looking at the speaker with steady gaze. Many lines crossed his countenance now, but the crooked scar had not faded with time. In a coffin his would be the face of an old man. Alive, it was so colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a man in hard lines financially.
“I want money and I want it quick, or I’d not come clear out here. And you are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I’ve held grown to weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley’s at the last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him. He’ll never own a quarter again,” Smith spoke composedly.
“Yes, I guess you’re right. You’ve done him to his ruin. Jacobs has a mortgage on his home, too, and a Jew’s a Jew. He’ll close on Jim with a snap yet. It won’t be the first time he’s done it,” Darley Champers declared.
“And that niece, Tank’s girl, he was to protect for Alice Leigh?” Smith asked.
“Oh, eventually she’ll either marry some hired man, I reckon, or go to sewin’ or something like it for a livin’. She’s a danged pretty girl now, but girls fade quick,” Champers said.
For just one instant something like remorse swept Smith’s face. Then he hardened again as the ruling passion asserted itself. 241
“Serves her right,” he said in a tone so brutal that Champers remembered it.
“But I tell you I must have money. Two hundred dollars tonight and fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And you’ll get it for me. You understand that. And listen, now.” Smith’s voice slowly uncoiled itself to Champers’ senses as a snake moves leisurely toward a bird it means to draw to itself. “You say you have signed my name for me and transacted business, handling my money. If you care to air the thing in court, I’m ready for you anytime. But do you dare? Well, bring me two hundred dollars before tomorrow and the other fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And after this look out for yourself.”
The threat in the last words was indescribable, and Champers would have shuddered could he have seen Smith’s countenance as he left the room.
“So he taunts me with being a coward and a brute, a thief and a cut-throat; dares to strike me in the face when I’ve given him a living so long he’s forgotten who did it. I’m done with him. But he don’t dare to say a word.”