Part 29

"She doesn't agree to the deal?" Simmons queried sharply.

"Whatever I say is good enough for Lettice," Gordon replied.

An expression of relief settled over the other. "The papers will be ready this week," he said. "I have taken all that, and some expense, off you. You will make a nice thing out of it."

"I will," Gordon assented heartily. "And that reminds me--I saw an old acquaintance of Pompey Hollidew's in Greenstream to-day. I don't know his name; I drove him up in the stage, and Pompey greeted him like a long-lost dollar."

A veiled, alert curiosity was plain on Simmons's smooth, pinkish countenance.

"I wonder if you know him too?--a man with a beard, a great hand for maps and cigars."

"Well?" Valentine Simmons temporized.

"Could he have anything to do with those timber options of the old man's, with your offer for them?"

"Well?" Simmons repeated. His face was now absolutely blank; he sat turned from his ledgers, facing Gordon, without a tremor.

"It's no use, Simmons," Gordon Makimmon admitted; "I was out by the old mill this morning. I saw you both, heard something that was said. That railroad will do a lot for values around here, but mostly for timber."

Instantly, and with no wasted regrets over lost opportunities, Simmons changed his tactics to meet existing conditions. "Your wife's estate controls about three thousand acres of timber," he pronounced. "What will you take for them?"

"How much do you control?" Gordon asked.

"About twenty-five hundred at present."

Gordon paused, then, "Lettice will take thirty dollars an acre."

"Why!" the other protested, "Pompey bought them for little or nothing. You're after over two hundred per cent. increase."

"What do you figure to get out of yours?"

"That doesn't concern us now. I've had to put this through--a tremendous thing for Greenstream, a lasting benefit--entirely by myself. I will have to guarantee a wicked profit outside; I stand alone to lose a big sum. I'll give you ten dollars for the options."

Gordon rose. "I'll see the railroad people myself," he observed; "and find out what I can do there."

"Hold on," Simmons waved him back to his chair. "If there's too much talk the thing will get out. You know these thick skulls around here--at the whisper of transportation you couldn't cut a sapling with a gold axe. It took managing to interest the Tennessee and Northern; they are going through to Buffalo; a Greenstream branch is only a side issue to them." He paused, thinking. "There's no good," he resumed, "in you and me getting into each other. The best thing we can do is to control all the good stuff, agree on a price, and divide the take."

Gordon carefully considered this new proposal. It seemed to him palpably fair. "All the papers would have to be made together," he added; "what's for one's for the other."

Now that the deal was fully exposed Valentine Simmons was impatient of small precautions. "Can't you see how the plan lays?" he demanded irritably. "We'll draw up a partnership. Don't get full and talk," he added discontentedly. It was evident that he keenly resented the absence of Pompey Hollidew from the transaction.

"A thing like this," he informed the other, "ain't put through in a week. It will be two or three years yet before the company will be ready for construction."

Minor details were rehearsed, concluded. Two weeks later Gordon signed an agreement of partnership with Valentine Simmons to purchase collectively such timber options as were deemed desirable, and to merchandise their interests at a uniform price to the railroad company concerned.

XIII

When Gordon returned to his dwelling he found Sim Caley and his sister's husband taking the horse from the shafts of a dusty, two-seated carriage. Rutherford Berry was a slightly-built man with high, narrow shoulders, and a smooth, pasty-white face. He was clerk in a store at the farther end of Greenstream valley, and had flat, fragile wrists and a constant, irritating cough.

"H'y, Gord!" he shouted; "your sister wanted to visit with you over night, and see Lettice. We only brought two--the oldest and Barnwell K."

The "oldest," Gordon recalled, was the girl who had worn Clare's silk waist and "run the colors"; Barnwell K. Berry was, approximately, ten.

"That's right," he returned cordially. He assisted in running the carriage back by the shed. Lettice and his sister were stiffly facing each other in the sitting room. The latter had a fine, thin countenance with pale hair drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible kitchen stove, or a child temporarily unaccounted for.