The eyes of the clerk were steadily regarding his furious chief, and somehow the quiet reminder was not without effect. Booker shifted his gaze and it fell on the lamentable design of the skull.
“This thing sets me crazy mad,” he protested, and his tone had somehow fallen from its original bluster.
“But you’ll be madder—for a while—at the hanging bee.”
Booker broke into a short, harsh laugh at his clerk’s persistence in dwelling upon the thing he saw lying ahead.
“That stunt has got you scared all right, Jake,” Booker said, with a world of contempt in the quick look he raised to the man’s pale face. “Maybe you’re guessing, seeing you’re my clerk, they’ll need you to be present to share in the game.”
A flush mounted to the clerk’s cheeks.
“You can guess that way if you fancy, boss,” he retorted, in a pronounced change of tone. Then his eyes searched the fat, unsmiling face before him. “But you best get this right now and get it quick. I’m out for your profit as well as my own. I’m out to see this business go right on without any interruption in the nature of a hanging bee. If you collected that chunk of real estate for two thousand dollars on top of the mortgage it would be a swell profit. Some folks might call it robbery, seeing they ain’t in it. But ten thousand dollars is bedrock just now as they say in that brief, and, when boom time comes again, you won’t miss the six thousand dollars’ difference they’re demanding. Well, I guess I’d buy off a hanging bee, with me as the centrepiece, any old time for six thousand dollars. And if you’re wise, I guess you’ll act that way, too.”
“But you’re forgetting the bluff of it all,” Booker said, without looking up. Then he raised his hard eyes. “Gee, haven’t you any sort of old guts makes you want to kick? Can you stand for a thing like that?” he cried, holding up the ill-written document. “Are we men, or——?”
“We certainly wouldn’t be men for long if we didn’t stand for it. You don’t seem to get a grip of this thing, boss. I’ve watched it all the time. This Aurora bunch is as real as the old Ku-Klux Klan, that cleaned up the south in the nigger days. You’re wondering if we’re men. Well, I’d say right here, let’s be. Don’t write your offer in a hurry. Think awhile. An’ when you’ve thought good I’ll saddle my pony and ride out to Rebecca Carver with the result. It won’t hurt us to get that block at the price they say. But it will at any other. I’m making that tracing of the new city limits and need to get right on with it. Maybe in a while you’ll let me know the thing you’ve decided.”
Jake turned away and passed quickly into the outer office, closing the partition door carefully behind him. Booker watched him go with eyes which had doubt in them for the first time. Yielding was utterly foreign to his nature where advantage in a transaction lay within his grasp. But the mild-eyed clerk had driven home his argument in a fashion all the more relentless for its sobriety. And for once in his life Bad Booker, the usurer, was thinking more of the vision of a hanging as conjured by his subordinate than he was of robbing a helpless widow of six thousand dollars.