A sense of relief at this sudden opportunity, combined with the intense satisfaction of getting even with Thomas Smith, overwhelmed him. Smith would rave at the sale to a Shirley, yet this sale had been demanded. Champers had written Smith’s name into too many documents to need the owner’s handwriting in this transaction. Smith would leave town in the evening. The whole thing was easy enough. While Leigh waited, the real humaneness of which Champers so often boasted found its voice within him.
“I’ll sell it for sixteen hundred dollars if I can get two hundred down today and the rest in cash inside of two weeks. But I must close the bargain today, you understand.”
He had fully meant to make it seventeen hundred fifty dollars. It was the unknown humane thing in him that cut off his own commission.
“It’s worth it,” he said to himself. “Won’t Thomas Smith, who’s got no name to sign to a piece of paper, won’t he just cuss when it’s all did! It’s worth my little loss just to get something dead on him. The tricky thief!”
“I’ll take it,” Leigh said, a strange light glowing in her eyes and a firm line settling about her red lips.
Champers couldn’t realize an hour later how it was all done, nor why with such a poor bargain for himself he should feel such satisfaction as he saw Leigh Shirley and Thaine Aydelot driving down the road toward Little Wolf together. Neither could he understand why the perfume of white lilac blossoms from the bush in the back yard of his office should seem so sweet this morning. He was not a flower lover. But he felt the two hundred dollars of good 245 money in his pocket and chuckled as he forecasted the hour of Thomas Smith’s discovery.
“This is a shadier road than the one I came over this morning,” Leigh said as she and Thaine followed the old trail toward Little Wolf Creek.
“It’s a little nearer, too, and you’ll see by casting a glimpse westward that things are doing over Grass River way,” Thaine replied.
Leigh saw that a sullen black cloud bank was heaving above the western horizon and felt the heated air of the May afternoon.
“I don’t like storms when I’m away from home,” she said.