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"There's to be no business between you and me," King told him promptly. "But there is. If you've got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen Brodie knows something a whole lot " "It strikes me," frowned King, "that you know more of this than I gave you credit for. Where do you come in?"
"That's two thousand, Honeycutt!" "Two thousand," repeated Honeycutt, nodding. He was sucking at his lips, his mouth puckered, his cheeks sunken in. He got up and shambled on his cane close to the table, leaning against it, thrusting his peering eyes down. King counted out the last crisp note. "Three thousand dollars." He stepped back a pace. "Three thousand dollars! That's a might of money, Mark.
An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pass unnoticed. What he had not counted on was finding Swen Brodie himself before him in Honeycutt's shanty.
Equally inevitable was it, too, that the two clans should take the quarrel up, and for half a century the two families had, with intermittent times of truce, been traditional enemies. The boy's father, Jason Hawn, had married a Honeycutt in a time of peace, and, when the war opened again, was regarded as a deserter, and had been forced to move over the spur to the Honeycutt side.
They can't know, since we've got the Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have lost the game!" "You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"
Indeed, another mountaineer, Hiram Honeycutt, an uncle to little Aaron, was, it seemed, in greater danger than Steve, but the suspect in most peril was an auditor's clerk from the Blue-grass; so it looked as though old Jason's prophecy that the real murderer, if a mountaineer, would never be convicted might yet come true.
Brodie ripped out a string of oaths, demanding: "Who told you to come in? You you " "He was aiming to kill me," cried old Honeycutt, dragging and pulling at King's sleeve. "He was for doin' for me like that!" He pointed to the floor. There lay a heavy iron poker bent double. "He done it. Brodie done it. He was for doin' me " "You old fool, I'll do you yet," growled Brodie.
The girl's father, Steve Hawn, a ne'erdo-well and the son of a ne'er-do-well, had for his inheritance wild lands, steep, supposedly worthless, and near the head of the Honeycutt cove.
Dimly in my memory is a suggestion that when we passed Uncle Jerry Honeycutt, I confided to her that he sent to Chicago for his ear-trumpet and that it cost twelve dollars. If I did this, she must have made a suitable response, though I retain nothing of it.
Honeycutt did not know immediately that any one had entered; either his old ears had not heard, or his excited mind was concentrated so excludingly on Brodie that he had no thought of aught else. Brodie, however, turned his small, restless eyes, that were like two shiny bright-blue buttons, upon the intruder. His great mouth stood open showing his teeth.
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