now, but the crooked scar had not faded with time.
In a coffin his would be the face of an old man. Alive, it was so
colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred
would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of
dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down
appearance as of a man in hard lines financially.

"I want money and I want it quick, or I'd not come clear out here. And you
are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I've held grown to
weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley's at the
last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him. He'll never own a
quarter again," Smith spoke composedly.

"Yes, I guess you're right. You've done him to his ruin. Jacobs has a
mortgage on his home, too, and a Jew's a Jew. He'll close on Jim with a
snap yet. It won't be the first time he's done it," Darley Champers
declared.

"And that niece, Tank's girl, he was to protect for Alice Leigh?" Smith
asked.

"Oh, eventually she'll either marry some hired man, I reckon, or go to
sewin' or something like it for a livin'. She's a danged pretty girl now,
but girls fade quick," Champers said.

For just one instant something like remorse swept Smith's face. Then he
hardened again as the ruling passion asserted itself.

"Serves her right," he said in a tone so brutal that Champers remembered
it.

"But I tell you I must have money. Two hundred dollars tonight and
fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And you'll get it for me. You
understand that. And listen, now." Smith's voice slowly uncoiled itself to
Champers' senses as a snake moves leisurely toward a bird it means to draw
to itself. "You say you have signed my name for me and transacted
business, handling my money. If you care to air the thing in court, I'm
ready for you anytime. But do you dare? Well, bring me two hundred dollars
before tomorrow and the other fourteen hundred inside of two weeks. And
after this look out for yourself."

The threat in the last words was indescribable, and Champers would have
shuddered could he have seen Smith's countenance as he left the room.

"So he taunts me with being a coward and a brute, a thief and a
cut-throat; dares to strike me in the face when I've given him a living so
long he's forgotten who did it. I'm done with him. But he don't dare to
say a word."

He shut his lips tightly and slowly clinched his hands.

"For wy you