That man Winthrop is a member of the company. Now, while I have not as many lots for sale as the Town Company, my prices beat them all holler.”
“Do you think,” asked Vance, “that Mr. Winthrop charged me too much for my lots?”
“Think!” said Steve Gibbons, “think? why, pardner, all the agents in town are laughin’ about it; he took you in.”
Vance bit his lips, and mentally concluded to investigate very thoroughly before he quit Waterville.
“You see,” Gibbons went on, “all us fellers are down on the Town Company. We don’t like corporations, nohow; they don’t give us honorable-intentioned fellers a fair chance. We are the men that’s buildin’ up this here town—givin’ it the bone, and the sinew, and the standin’, so to speak. Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” said Vance, “I understand,” and begging to be excused, he turned and walked away from the “honorable-intentioned” Steve Gibbons, and soon after sought the privacy of his own room in the Ballard House.
Dick Ballard was a Grand Army man, and kept the only hotel of any importance in Waterville. The only thing first-class about it was the price for lodging. Immediately after the average traveler settled his bill at the Ballard, there was generally a half-distinct impression in his mind that he had been stopping at a first-class hotel, but the remembrance of three kinds of meat cooked in the same kettle was not easily forgotten.
As Vance sat in his room, in anything but a pleasant frame of mind, there came a gentle knock on his door. He quickly admitted his visitor, and found it was Dick Ballard, the proprietor.