Part 47

"Why, the deal with the railroad."

"Sim," Gordon demanded sharply, "you never believed that in the paper?"

"I don't know what to b'lieve," the other replied evasively; "a good many say those are the facts, that you have the options."

"Get out of here!" Gordon shouted in a sudden moving rage; "and stay out; don't come back when you find what's what."

"I c'n do that. And I'll point out to you we just came for Lettice, we never took nothing of yours. I only stopped now to warn you away ... I'll hitch her up, Gordon; you get down the road."

"It's mine now, whose ever it was awhile back. I've paid for it. You go."

Simeon Caley lingered reluctantly at the door. Gordon stood rigidly; his eyes were bright points of wrath, his arm rose, with a finger indicating the world without. The former slowly opened the door, stepped out upon the porch; he stayed a moment more, then closed himself from sight.

XVIII

The stir and heat of Sim's presence died quickly away; the house was without a sound; General Jackson lay like an effigy in ravelled black and buff wool. Gordon assembled the scattered papers on the table into an orderly pile. He moved into the kitchen, abstractedly surveyed the familiar walls; he walked through the house to the sitting room, where he stood lost in thought:

The County was "mad clear through"; Sim, supposing him guilty, had warned him to escape, advised him to run away.... That had never been a habit of the Makimmons, he would not form it now, at the end. He was not considering the mere probability of being shot, but of the greater disaster that had already smashed the spring of his living. His sensibilities were deadened to any catastrophe of the flesh.

At the same time he was conscious of a mounting rage at being so gigantically misunderstood, and his anger mingled with a bitter contempt for Simeon Caley, for a people so blind, so credulous, so helpless in the grasp of a single, shrewd individual.

He heard subdued voices without, and, through a window, saw that the sweep by the stream was filling with a sullen concourse of men; he saw their faces, grim and resentful, turned toward the house; the sun struck upon the dusty, black expanse of their hats.

He walked deliberately through the bedroom and out upon the porch. A sudden, profound silence met his appearance, a shifting of feet, a concerted, bald, inimical stare.

"Well?" Gordon Makimmon demanded; "you've read the Bugle, well?"

He heard a murmur from the back of the throng,

"Give it to him, we didn't come here to talk."

"'Give it to him,'" Gordon repeated thinly. "I see Ben Nickles there, behind that hulk from the South Fork; Nickles'll do it and glad. It will wipe off the two hundred dollars he had out of me for a new roof. Or there's Entriken if Nickles is afraid, his note falls due again soon."

"What about the railroad?"

"What about it? Greenstream's been settled for eighty years, why haven't you moved around and got one? Do you expect the President of the Tennessee and Northern to come up and beg you to let them lay tracks to your doors? If you'd been men you'd had one long ago, but you're just--just stock. I'd rather be an outlaw on the mountain than any of you; I'd ruther be what you think I am; by God!" he cried out of his bitterness of spirit, "but I'd ruther be Valentine Simmons!"

"Have you got the options?" Entriken demanded--"all them that Pompey had and you bought?"

Gordon vanished into the house, and reappeared with the original contracts in his grasp.

"Here they are," he exclaimed; "I paid eighty-nine thousand dollars to get them, and they're worth--that," he flung them with a quick gesture into the air, and the rising wind scattered them fluttering over the sere grass. "Scrabble for them in the dirt."

"You c'n throw them away now the railroad's left you."

"And before," Gordon Makimmon demanded, "do you think I couldn't have gutted you if I'd had a mind to? do you think anybody couldn't gut you? Why, you've been the mutton of every little storekeeper that let you off with a pound of coffee, of any note shaver that could write. The Bugle says I let out money to cover up the railway deal, but that'd be no better than giving it to stop the sight of the blind. God A'mighty! this transportation business you're only whining about now was laid out five years ago, the company's agents have driven in and out twenty times...."

"Let him have it!"

"Spite yourselves!" Gordon Makimmon cried; "it's all that's left for you."

General Jackson moved forward over the porch. He growled in response to the menace of the throng on the sod, and jumped down to their level. A sudden, dangerous murmur rose:

"The two hundred dollar dog! The joke on Greenstream!"