"Can it be an invitation?" said George Henry, his heart beating. He opened the sturdy envelope and read the words it had enclosed. Then he leaned back, very still, in his chair, with his eyes shut. His heart bled over what he had suffered. "Had" suffered—yes, that was right, for it was all a thing of the past. The letter made it clear that he was comparatively a rich man. That was all.
It was the despised—but not altogether despised, since he had thought of making it his home—poplar land in Michigan. The poplar supply is limited, and paper-mills have capacious maws. Prices of raw material had gone up, and the poplar hunters had found George Henry's land the most valuable to them in the region. A syndicate offered him one hundred dollars an acre for the tract.
Joy failed to kill George Henry Harrison. It stunned him somewhat, but he showed wonderful recuperative powers. As he ate a free-lunch after a five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes cracked. His demeanor when he called upon an attorney, a former friend, was quite that of an American gentleman perfectly at his ease.
Within a few days George Henry Harrison had deposited to his credit in bank the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, minus the slight cost of certain immediate personal requirements. Then one morning he stalked over to his little office, now clean and natty. He leaned back in his chair again and devoted himself to thinking, the persons on whom his mind dwelt being his creditors.
The proper title for the brief account which follows should be The Feast of the Paying of Bills. Here was a man who had suffered, here was a man who had come to doubt himself, and who had now become suddenly and arrogantly independent. His creditors, he knew, were hopeless. That he had so few lawsuits to meet was only because those to whom he owed money had reasoned that the cost of collection would more than offset the sum gained in the end from this man, who had, they thought, no real property behind him. Their attitude had become contemptuous. Now he stood forth defiant and jaunty.
There is a time in a man's failing fortunes when he borrows and gives his note blithely. He is certain that he can repay it. He runs up bills as cheerfully, sure that they will easily be met at the end of thirty days. With George Henry this now long past period had left its souvenirs, and the torture they had inflicted upon him has been partly told.
Now came the sweet and glorious hour of his relief.
It was a wonderful sensation to him. He marveled that he had so respectfully thought of the creditors who had dogged him. They were people, he now said, of whom he should not have thought at all. He became a magnificently objective reasoner. But there was work to be done.
George Henry decided that, since there were certain people to whom he must write, each letter being accompanied by a check for a certain sum of money, each letter should appropriately indicate to its recipient the calm and final opinion of the writer regarding the general character and reputation of the person or firm addressed. The human nature of George Henry asserted itself very strongly just here. He set forth paper and ink, took up his pen, and poised his mind for a feast of reason and flow of soul which should be after the desire of his innermost heart.
First, George Henry carefully arranged in the order of their date of incurring a list of all his debts, great and small—not that he intended to pay them in that order, but where a creditor had waited long he decided that his delay in paying should be regarded as in some degree extenuating and excusing the fierceness of the assaults made upon a luckless debtor. The creditors chanced to have had no choice in the matter, but that did not count. Age hallowed a debt to a certain slight extent.