The Humaneness of Champers
| What is the use of trying to make things worse? Let’s find things to do, and forget things. —The Light That Failed. |
On the third day after Darley Champers had closed with Leigh Shirley, Horace Carey walked into his office.
“Hello, Champers, how’s business?” he asked, with the cheerful way that drew even his enemies to him.
“Danged bad!” Champers replied. “Rotten world is full of danged fools who want money and ain’t satisfied when you get it for ’em.”
“Have you made such a sale lately?” Carey inquired.
“Yes; day before yesterday,” Champers replied.
“Was it the old Jim Shirley quarter, the Cloverdale Ranch?” the doctor asked.
“The very place, and I’m in a devil of a fix, too,” Darley Champers declared. “The trouble is I’m dead sure I’ll not get the other fourteen hundred.”
Thomas Smith had been paid the two hundred dollars and had fully released the land to Champers to finish the sale. Unfortunately for Champers, Smith still hung about Wykerton, annoying his agent so much that in a fit of anger, Champers revealed the fact that Leigh Shirley was the buyer of the Cloverdale Ranch. Smith’s rage was the greater because he did not believe the price money could be paid by a girl without resources, and against this girl 264 he was not now ready to move. The burden of the whole matter now was that Darley Champers had taken his life in his own hands by the deal. The bulldog in Champers was roused now, and, while he was a good many things evil, he was not a coward.