n in any form, the
fourteen-year-old Tim was better than Nelson with his fifty years'
experience of a wicked and bargaining world.

Was that any part of the reason, he wondered to-day, why at the end of
thirty years of unflinching toil and honesty, he found himself with
a vast budget of experience in the ruinous loaning of money, with a
mortgage on the farm of a friend, and a mortgage on his own farm likely
to be foreclosed? Perhaps it might have been better to stay in Henry
County. He had paid for his farm at last. He had known a good moment,
too, that day he drove away from the lawyer's with the cancelled
mortgage in his pocket and Tim hopping up and down on the seat for
joy. But the next day Richards--just to give him the chance of a good
thing--had brought out that Maine man who wanted to buy him out. He was
anxious to put the money down for the new farm, to have no whip-lash of
debt forever whistling about his ears as he ploughed, ready to sting did
he stumble in the furrows; and Tim was more anxious than he; but--there
was Richards! Richards was a neighbor who thought as he did about Henry
George and Spiritualism, and belonged to the Farmers' Alliance, and
had lent Nelson all the works of Henry George that he (Richards) could
borrow. Richards was in deep trouble. He had lost his wife; he might
lose his farm. He appealed to Nelson, for the sake of old friendship,
to save him. And Nelson could not resist; so, two thousand of the
thirty-four hundred dollars that the Maine man paid went to Richards,
the latter swearing by all that is holy, to pay his friend off in full
at the end of the year. There was money coming to him from his dead
wife's estate, but it was tied up in the courts. Nelson would not listen
to Tim's prophecies of evil. But he was a little dashed when Richards
paid neither interest nor principal at the year's end, although he gave
reasons of weight; and he experienced veritable consternation when the
renewed mortgage ran its course and still Richards could not pay. The
money from his wife's estate had been used to improve his farm (Nelson
knew how rundown everything was), his new wife was sickly and "didn't
seem to take hold," there had been a disastrous hail-storm--but
why rehearse the calamities? they focussed on one sentence: it was
impossible to pay.

Then Nelson, who had been restfully counting on the money from Richards
for his own debt, bestirred himself, only to find his patient creditor
gone