it has been upset, we
don't know where we stand, or who's who; it's bad.

"I said you suffered with the rest of us, but you are worse off still. How
shall I put it?--the County is taking sad advantage of your,
er--liberality. There's young Entriken; he was in the store a little time
ago and told me that you had extended his note again. He thought it was
smart to hold out the money on you. There's not a likelier farm, nor
better conditioned cattle, than his in Greenstream. He could pay twenty
notes like yours in a day's time. I hate to see money cheapened like that,
it ain't healthy.

"What is it you're after, Gordon? Is it at the incorruptible, the
heavenly, treasure you're aiming? But if it is I'll venture this--that the
Lord doesn't love a fool. And the man with the talents, don't overlook
him."

"I'm not aiming at anything," Gordon answered, "I'm just doing."

"And there's that Hagan that got five thousand from you, it's an open fact
about him. He came from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk, to
get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment, of a kin in
Greenstream and left for parts unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn't love a
fool."

"I may be a fool as you see me," Gordon contended stubbornly; "and the few
liars that get my money may laugh. But there's this, there's this,
Simmons--I'm not cursed by the dispossessed and the ailing and the plumb
penniless. I don't go to a man with his crop a failure on the field like,
well--we'll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand for his breath. I've
put a good few out of--of Cannon's reach. Did you forget that I know how
it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps, call out my place for
debt? Did you forget that I sat in this office while you talked of old
Presbyterian friends and sold me into the street?"

"Incorrigible," Valentine Simmons said, "incorrigible; no sense of
responsibility. I had hoped Pompey's estate would bring some out in you.
But I should have known--it's the Makimmon blood; you are the son of your
father. I knew your grandfather too, a man that fairly insulted
opportunity."

"We've never been storekeepers."

"Never kept much of anything, have you, any of you? You can call it what
you've a mind to, liberality or shiftlessness. But there's nothing saved
by names. There: it seems as if you never got civilized, always
contemptuous and violent-handed ... it's the blood. I've studied
considerable about you lately; something'll h