can give you something day after to-morrow, when I am paid."

"Entirely satisfactory; three hundred--no, for you two hundred and fifty
dollars will be sufficient; the rest another time ... whenever you are
able."

"I get two dollars and fifty cents a day," Gordon reminded him, with a dry
and bitter humor, "and I have a month's pay coming."

Valentine Simmons had not, apparently, heard him. "Two hundred and fifty
only," he repeated; "we always like to accommodate old friends, especially
Presbyterian friends."

"I can give you fifty dollars," Gordon told him, at once loud and
conciliatory; wondering, at the same time, how, if he did, Clare and
himself would manage. He had to pay for his board in Stenton; the doctor
for Clare had to be met--fifty cents in hand a visit, or the visits
ceased.

"Have your little joke, then get out that hidden stocking, pry up that
particular fire brick ... only two hundred and fifty now ... but--now."

A hopeless feeling of impotence enveloped Gordon: the small, dry man
before him with the pink, bald head shining in the lamplight, the set
grin, was as remote from any appeal as an insensate figure cast in metal,
a painted iron man in neat, grey alpaca, a stiff, white shirt with a small
blue button and an exact, prim muslin bow.

Still, "I'll give you fifty, and thirty the next month. Why, damn it, I'll
pay you off in the year. I'm not going to run away. I have steady work;
you know what I am getting; you're safe."

"But," Valentine Simmons lifted a hand in a round, glistening cuff, "is
anything certain in this human vale? Is anything secure that might hang on
the swing of a ... whip?"

With an unaccustomed, violent effort of will Gordon Makimmon suppressed
his angry concern at the other's covert allusion: outside his occupation
as stage driver he was totally without resources, without the ability to
pay for a bag of Green Goose tobacco. The Makimmons had never been
thrifty ... in the beginning they had let their wide share of valley
holding grow deep in thicket, where they might hunt the deer, their
streams course through a woven wild where pheasant might feed and fall to
their accurate guns.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars," Valentine Simmons repeated pleasantly.

"I haven't got it, and can't get it, all at once," Gordon reiterated in a
conciliatory manner. Then his straining, chafing pride, his assaulted
self-esteem, overflowed a little his caution. "And you know it," he
declar