far off either, we'll
shake off the grip of these blood-money men; we'll have a state lawed
bank; a rate of interest a man can carry without breaking his back.
There's no better land than the Bottom, or the higher clearings for
grazing ... it's the men, some of 'em...."

VIII

It was dark when Gordon closed the stable door and turned to his dwelling.
A light streamed from a chink in the closed kitchen shutter like a gold
arrow shot into the night. From within came the long-drawn quaver of
William Vibard's performance of the Arkansas Traveller. He was sitting
bowed over the accordion, his jaw dropped, his eyes glazed with the
intoxication of his obsession. Rose was rigidly upright in a straight
chair, her hands crossed at the wrists in her meager lap.

The fluctuating, lamentable sounds of the instrument, Rose's expression of
conscious virtue, were suddenly petty, exasperating; and Gordon, after a
short acknowledgment of their greeting, proceeded through the house to the
sitting room beyond.

No fire had been laid in the small, air-tight stove; the room had a
closed, musty smell, and was more chill than the night without; his breath
hung before him in a white vapor. Soon he had wood burning explosively,
the stove grew rapidly red hot and the chill vanished. He saw beyond the
lamp with its shade of minute, variously-colored silks the effigy of Mrs.
Hollidew dead. Undisturbed in the film of dust that overlaid the table
stood a pink celluloid thimble ... Lettice had placed it there....

His thoughts turned to Alexander Crandall and his wife, to the extended
sheep-cots, and the "light" which they now saw. He recalled the former's
assertion that the land was all right, but that the blood-money men made
life arduous in Greenstream. He remembered Edgar Crandall's arraignment of
the County as "the littlest, meanest place on earth," a place where a man
who wanted his own, his chance, was helpless to survive the avarice of a
few individuals, the avarice for gold. He had asked him, Gordon Makimmon,
to give him that chance. But, obviously, it was impossible ... absurd.

His memory drifted back to the evening in the store when Valentine Simmons
had abruptly demanded payment of his neglected account, to the hopeless
rage that had possessed him at the realization of his impotence, of
Clare's illness. That scene, that bitter realization of ruin, had been
repeated across the breadth of Greenstream. As a boy he had heard men