uslins.

"Mr. Simmons wants you a minute in the office," the clerk responded
indirectly to his request for ginger. Gordon instinctively masked a
gathering premonition of trouble. "Fill her up the while," he demanded,
pushing forward the empty bottle.

Valentine Simmons was a small man with a pinkly bald head ornamented with
fluffs of white hair like cotton wool above his ears, and precise, shaven
lips forever awry in the pronouncing of rallying or benevolent sentences;
these, with appropriate religious sentiments, formed nine-tenths of his
discourse, through which the rare words that revealed his purposes, his
desires, flashed like slender and ruthless knives.

He was bending over a tall, narrow ledger when Gordon entered the office;
but he immediately closed the book and swung about in his chair. The small
enclosure was hot, and filled with the odor of scorching metal, the
buzzing of a large, blundering fly.

"Ah!" Valentine Simmons exclaimed pleasantly; "our link with the outer
world, our faithful messenger.... I wanted to see you; ah, yes." He turned
over the pages of a second, heavier ledger at his hand. "Here it
is--Gordon Makimmon, good Scotch Presbyterian name. Five hundred and
thirty dollars," he said suddenly, unexpectedly.

Gordon was unable to credit his senses, the fact that this was the sum of
his indebtedness; it was an absurd mistake, and he said so.

"Everything listed against its date," the other returned imperturbably,
"down to a pair of white buck shoes for a lady to-day--a generous present
for some enslaver."

"My sister," Gordon muttered ineptly. Five hundred and thirty dollars, he
repeated incredulously to himself. Five hundred.... "How long has it been
standing?" he asked.

The other consulted the book. "Two years, a month and four days," he
returned exactly.

"But no notice was served on me; nothing was said about my bill."

"Ah, we don't like to annoy old friends; just a little word at necessary
intervals."

Old rumors, stories, came to Gordon's memory in regard to the long credit
extended by Simmons to "old friends," the absence of any rendered
accounts; and, in that connection, the thought of the number of homesteads
throughout the county that had come, through forced sales, into the
storekeeper's hands. The circumstantial details of these events had been
bitten by impassioned oaths into his mind, together with the memory of the
dreary ruin that had settled upon the evicted.

"I