"I'm proud of you, and I want you to show these people that you dance even better than you ride."
Allie rose to the challenge.
About midnight Calvin Gray strolled outdoors for a breath of fresh air before retiring. He glowed with the consciousness of a worthy deed well done. He had come to the Notch expecting to spend one night, but events of the last few hours had induced him to change his plans, and he now made up his mind to stay several days. He was burning to be back in the oil fields, to be sure; every hour away from them was an hour wasted, and although he told himself it was his feud that drew him, he knew better. As a matter of fact, when he thought of Texas it was of Wichita Falls, and when he visualized the latter place it was to picture a cottage with the paint off or a small office with the sign, "Tom and Bob Parker, Real Estate and Insurance."
He had been eagerly, selfishly, counting the hours until his return, but here, it seemed, was work to be done, a task that he alone could accomplish, and his decision to remain had been made final when Allie Briskow told him with tremulous earnestness that he had saved her life—when she confessed that she had intended to kill herself, and why.
Naturally Gray had put no faith in that wild declaration, nevertheless it was plain that the girl—that all three Briskows—needed a friend to guide them. He sighed with resignation, but reflected that, inasmuch as he had put his hand to the plow, he must turn the furrow. After all, he could well afford to spare a week to put that girl on the road to happiness.
CHAPTER XVI
From the day of their first meeting, Henry Nelson and Calvin Gray had clashed. No two people could be more different in disposition and temper, hence it was only natural that every characteristic, every action of the one should have aroused the other's antagonism. Nelson was a cool, selfish, calculating plodder with little imagination and less originality; he thought in grooves. His was a splendid type of mind for a banker. He had but one weak point—viz., a villainous temper, a capacity for blind, vindictive rage—a weakness, truly, for a man who dealt in money—but a weakness that lent him a certain humanity and without which he would have been altogether too mechanical, too colorless, too efficient. Nature seldom errs by making supermen. A drab man, in many ways, Nelson was extraordinary mainly in this, that his mind followed straight, obvious channels, and that never, except under the urge of extreme passion, did he depart from the strictly logical line of action. In this, of course, he was superior to the average person, who too frequently undertakes the unusual. Calvin Gray's ebullience, his dash, his magnificence of demeanor, could be nothing less than an affront to such a man; Nelson could see in him only a pompous braggart, an empty, arrogant strutter.
Age and easy success had not improved the banker's apoplectic turn of mind, hence Gray's defiant declaration of war, his impudent assurance that the recent misfortunes to the house of Nelson were the direct results of his own deliberate efforts, had proven almost unendurable. In the first place, Nelson could not imagine a man making such a declaration; it was new to his entire experience and contrary to his code. It was unconservative, therefore it staggered him. It was, in fact, a phenomenon so unique as to leave him numb. He told himself that it must have been the act of a madman or a fool. Under no circumstances could he conceive of himself warning an enemy of his intentions; on the contrary, when he undertook to crush a rival he went about it slyly, secretly, in the only regular and proper way. As a matter of fact, it had come as a disagreeable surprise to learn that his former comrade at arms cherished any resentment whatever toward him, for he had thought his tracks were well covered.
What left the banker actually gasping, however, that which he came back to with unfailing astonishment, was Gray's effrontery in coming to Wichita Falls to boast of his accomplishments. That bespoke such contempt, such supreme self-confidence in his ability to wreak further damage, that Nelson wanted to shout aloud his rage and his defiance.
Following the departure of his two callers on that day of the meeting in the bank, Nelson closed his desk and went home. He could work no more. For several days thereafter he was an unpleasant person to do business with.