“Hadn’t you just as soon tear pickets off’n the fence there, or something like that?” wistfully queried Avery. “This is all I’ve got left, and I haven’t any money, and I haven’t had very much courage to do anything since she took that sixteen hundred dollars away from me.” He scruffed his raspy palms on his upcocked knees. “I didn’t really want to run away with her, Ivory, but she bossed me into it. I never was no hand to stand up for my rights. Any one, almost, could talk me ’round. I wish she’d stuck to you and let me alone.” His big hands trembled on his knees, and his weak face, with its flabby chaps, had the wistful look one sees on a foxhound’s visage. “When did you give up the road?” he asked.
“Haven’t given it up!” The tone was curt and the scowl deepened. “I’ve stored my wagons and the round-top and the seats, but I’m liable to buy an elephant and a lemon and start out again ’most any time.”
The eyes of the old men softened with a glint of appreciation as they looked at each other.
“I don’t suppose you have to,” suggested Avery, with a glance at the store.
“Fifty thousand in the bank and the stand of buildings here,” replied Buck, with the careless ease of the “well-fixed.” “How do you get your three squares nowadays?”
“Lecture on Lost Arts and Free Love and cure stuttering in one secret lesson, pay in advance,” Avery replied, listlessly. “But there ain’t the three squares in it. I wish I’d been as sharp as you are, and never let a woman whiffle me into a scrape.”
“Nobody ever come it over me,” declared Buck, pride slowly replacing his ire, but he added, gloomily; “excepting her, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it, and I’ve never seen another woman worth looking at—not for me, even if she did come it over me.”
“But she didn’t come it over you,” insisted Avery. “I’m the one she come it over, and look at me!” He made a despairing gesture that embraced all his pathetic appanage. “You are the one that’s come out ‘unrivaled, stupendous and triumphant,’ as your full sheeters used to say. If I was any help in steering her away I’m humbly glad of it, for I always liked you, Ivory.”
This gradual shifting to the ground of the benefactor, even of the servile sort, was not entirely placating, as Ivory Buck’s corrugated brow still hinted, but the constant iteration of admiration for his marvelous shrewdness and good fortune was having its effect. The old grudge and sorrow that had gnawed at his heart during so many years suddenly shooed away. The pain was assuaged. It was like opodeldoc stuffed into an aching tooth. He felt as though he would like to listen to a lot more of that comforting talk.
“Avery,” he cried, with a heartiness that surprised even himself, “you’re a poor old devil that’s been abused, and you seem to be all in.” He surveyed the wheezing horse and kicked another spoke from the yawning wheel.