Two weeks after she left the office her feet took her back to it, as if by volition of their own. The familiar walls, covered with photographs of alfalfa fields and tract maps painted with red ink, closed around her like the walls of home. Hutchinson sat smoking at his desk; nothing had changed. She said that she had only dropped in for a moment. How was business? Her eye automatically noted the squares of red on the maps. "Hello! That three-cornered piece by Sycamore Slough's gone! Who sold it?"
"Watson," said Hutchinson. "He's uncovered a gold mine in the Healdsburg country, selling the farmers hand over fist. Last week he brought down a prospect who—" She heard the story to its end, capped it with one of her own, and two hours had passed before she realized it.
In another week it had become her habit to drop in at the office every time she came down town, to discuss Hutchinson's difficulties with him, even on occasion to help him handle a sale. Business prospects were not brightening; the prune market was disrupted by the European War, orchardists were panic stricken; already a formless, darkening shadow hung over men's minds. In any case she had no intention of going back into business; she told herself that she detested it. And she continued to go to the office.
Hutchinson awaited her one day with a bit of news. A man named MacAdams had been telephoning; he was coming to the office; he wanted to see her. "MacAdams?" she repeated. "Odd—I seem to remember the name."
MacAdams came in five minutes later, and the sight of his square, deeply lined face, the deep-sunken eyes under bushy gray brows, brought back to her vividly all the details of her first sale. She met him with an out-stretched hand, which MacAdams ignored. "I'd like a few words with you, miss."
She led him into the inner office, closed the door, made him sit down. He sat upright, gnarled hands on his knees, and badly, in simple words, laid his case before her. The land she had sold him was no good. It was hard-pan land. After he bought it he had saved his money for a year and moved to that land. "They told me I could make the payments from the crops." He had leveled the forty acres, checked it, seeded it to alfalfa. The alfalfa had begun to die the second year. That fall he plowed it up and sowed grain. He made enough from that to pay for seed and meet the water-tax. In the spring he and his boy had planted beans. The boy had cultivated them, and he had worked out, making money enough for food. The irrigation ditch broke; they could get no water for the beans when they needed it. The beans had died. He was two years behind in his payments; he could not meet the interest; he owed a hundred dollars in grocery bills.
"I put three thousand dollars into that land. I went to see your firm about it. They said they would give me more time to pay the rest if I would keep up the interest. But I want no more farming; I'm done. They can have the land. It's no good on God's earth. I'm blaming nobody, miss. A man that is a fool is a fool. But I want back some of the money, so I can move my family to the city and live till I get a job. It is no more than justice, and I come to ask you for it."
She heard him to the end, one hand supporting her cheek, the other drawing aimless pencil marks on the desk blotter. His request was hopeless, she knew; even if Clark had wanted to return the money, it had gone long ago in overhead and in payments to the owners of the land. No one could be compelled to return any part of the payment MacAdams had made on the contract he had signed. Clearly before her eyes rose the picture of the little tract office, the smoky oil lamp, Nichols in his chair, and she herself awaiting the word from MacAdams' lips that would decide her fate and Bert's. Parrot-like words, repeated many times, resaid themselves. "I'm sorry. Of course you know that in any large tract of land there will be a few poor pieces. I acted in perfectly good faith; you saw the land, examined it—" She met MacAdams's eyes. "I'll give back all the money I made on it," she said.
She wrote a check for six hundred dollars, blotted it carefully, handed it to him. His stern face was as tremulous as water blown upon by the wind, but he said nothing, shaking her hand with a force that hurt and going away quickly with the check. After the door closed behind him she remembered that she had got only three hundred dollars from the sale. The remainder had gone to cover Bert's debts. At this, shaken by emotions, she laughed aloud.
"Well, anyway, now you'll have plenty to do!" she said to herself. "Now you'll get out and scurry for money to live on!" She felt a momentary chill of panic, but there was exhilaration in it.