I don't want always to be poor and despised, and have the other girls have prettier clothes than me!""I guess you can be pretty good and yet make money, if you are sharp enough. Of course you got to be sharper to be good and make money than you got to be, to be mean and make money.""Well, I know one thing, that Uncle ain't EVER going to make money.
He ----" The last word shrivelled on her lips, which puckered into a confused smile at the warning frown of her brother. The man that they were discussing had come round to them past the henhouse.
How much had he overheard?
He didn't seem angry, anyhow. He called: "Well, Evy, ready?" and Eve was glad to run into the house for her hat without looking at him.
It was a relief that she must sit on the back seat where she need not face Uncle Nelson. Tim sat in front; but Tim was so stupid he wouldn't mind.
Nor did he; it was Nelson Forrest that stole furtive glances at the lad's profile, the knitted brows, the freckled cheeks, the undecided nose, and firm mouth.
The boyish shoulders slouched forward at the same angle as that of the fifty-year-old shoulders beside him.
Nelson, through long following of the plough, had lost the erect carriage painfully acquired in the army.
He was a handsome man, whose fresh-colored skin gave him a perpetual appearance of having just washed his face.
The features were long and delicate. The brown eyes had a liquid softness like the eyes of a woman. In general the countenance was alertly intelligent; he looked younger than his years;but this afternoon the lines about his mouth and in his brows warranted every gray hair of his pointed short beard.
There was a reason. Nelson was having one of those searing flashes of insight that do come occasionally to the most blindly hopeful souls. Nelson had hoped all his life.
He hoped for himself, he hoped for the whole human race.
He served the abstraction that he called "PROgress" with unflinching and unquestioning loyalty. Every new scheme of increasing happiness by force found a helper, a fighter, and a giver in him;by turns he had been an Abolitionist, a Fourierist, a Socialist, a Greenbacker, a Farmers' Alliance man. Disappointment always was followed hard on its heels by a brand-new confidence.
Progress ruled his farm as well as his politics; he bought the newest implements and subscribed trustfully to four agricultural papers; but being a born lover of the ground, a vein of saving doubt did assert itself sometimes in his work; and, on the whole, as a farmer he was successful.
But his success never ventured outside his farm gates.
At buying or selling, at a bargain 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 and a woman in his stead who must have her money. He wrote again--sorely against his will--begging Richards to raise the money somehow.
Richards's answer was in his pocket, for he wore the best black broadcloth in which he had done honor to the lawyer, yesterday. Richards plainly was wounded; but he explained in detail to Nelson how he (Nelson)could borrow money of the banks on his farm and pay Miss Brown.
There was no bank where Richards could borrow money; and he begged Nelson not to drive his wife and little children from their cherished home.
Nelson choked over the pathos when he read the letter to Tim; but Tim only grunted a wish that HE had the handling of that feller. And the lawyer was as little moved as Tim. Miss Brown needed the money, he said.
The banks were not disposed to lend just at present; money, it appeared, was "tight;" so, in the end, Nelson drove home with the face of Failure staring at him between his horses' ears.
