“No, thanks! I’ve got the money to pay, and you may be dead sure it’s a comfortable feeling to know I’ve got it! I hope I’ll never have to sweat as I did for a year or two.” He frowned, and slapped his gloves together. “Look here, Eaton, you’re the hardest man to thank I ever saw, but for God’s sake, don’t ever think I don’t appreciate all you’ve done for me! You saved me—hauled me out when I was going down for the last time! I don’t know why you did it; there was no reason why you or anybody else should have done it.”
“It’s not I you have to thank; it’s an enlightened judiciary that upheld Kinney’s patents on Ivory Cement machinery.”
“There may be something in that,” Copeland admitted, “but there are other things I want to speak of. I insist on speaking of all of them. In picking up that Reynolds stock as you did—”
“Please stick to facts! It was our blithe gazelle Amidon who did that. I honestly didn’t know it was in existence till he came to me about it. Thank Jerry!”
“Thank him! I’m going to fire him if he doesn’t quit working me so hard,” laughed Copeland. “But you backed him, and advanced him the money. The way that boy strolled in with that certificate just as Eichberg was jamming me into a corner is the last thing I’ll think of when I die.”
“Strong sense of the dramatic, that Jerry!” observed Eaton musingly. “Great loss to the stage, his devotion to commerce.”
“He can sell goods, and he knows how to hypnotize other fellows into doing it. I’m giving him all the rope he wants. He’s the smartest youngster on the street, and I’m proud of him. There’s more than that; I’m going to tell you, because you’ve been mighty good to me and I want you to know just how desperate I was last November. I want you to know how near bottom I’d gone. Eaton, I tried to burn the store the night before the Western notes came due—and I’d have done it—I’d have done it if Jerry hadn’t stopped me!—God!” he groaned. His frame shook with repulsion and abhorrence and he turned his head to avoid Eaton’s eyes.
“It’s a good thing, Copeland,” said the lawyer quietly, “that we’re not allowed to be as bad as we want to be in this world. No man is ever that! That, for a lack of a better word, is my religion. Let’s go back to the notes. You say you prefer to pay them; but that’s wholly optional. It had occurred to me that you might want to keep the money in the business, and if you do it’s yours, quite indefinitely.”
Copeland shook his head and drew out a check.
“I made a big clean-up on my Cement stock and now that I’m out of it I’m never going to monkey on the outside again. Here you are, with interest!”