Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
This railroad, the coming of which would increase enormously the timber values of Greenstream County, had been the covert reason for Simmons' desire to purchase the options held by the Hollidew estate; it had been, during Pompey Hollidew's life, the reason for the acquisition of such extended timber interests.
He sat on a log, draining his shoes, pressing the water from his trousers, and smoked while the light of the moon brightened into a silvery radiance in which objects, trees, were greyly visible; reaches sank into soft obscurity. He recognized his position from the ruined mill he was on the edge of that farm of Pompey Hollidew's of which Bartamon had spoken.
However, I had a slight knowledge of Pompey Hollidew's arrangements. He was accustomed to discussing them with me. He liked my judgment in certain little matters; and, in that way, I got a general idea of his enterprises. He was a great hand for timber, your father-in-law; against weighty advice at the time of his death he was buying timber options here and there in the valley.
He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior. "Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued, "it hurts him like a cut with a hick'ry to see a dollar go.
Her father he was reputed to possess almost half a million dollars was a silent man, suspicious and wary in his contact and dealings with the world; and it was probable that those qualities had been softened in Pompey Hollidew's daughter to a habit of diffidence, to a customary, instinctive repression. No such characteristics laid their restraint on Buckley Simmons, her present companion.
"I have taken all that, and some expense, off you. You will make a nice thing out of it." "I will," Gordon assented heartily. "And that reminds me I saw an old acquaintance of Pompey Hollidew's in Greenstream to-day. I don't know his name; I drove him up in the stage, and Pompey greeted him like a long-lost dollar." A veiled, alert curiosity was plain on Simmons's smooth, pinkish countenance.
The importance of that latter fact had dimmed; the omnipotence of money had dwindled: for instance, any conceivable sum would be powerless to still that cry from within. In a way it had risen from the very fact of Pompey Hollidew's fortune Meta Beggs would never have considered him aside from it. He endeavored to curse the old man's successful avarice, but without any satisfaction.
Lettice, worn by her visitor's rapid monotone, the stir and clatter of young shoes, remarked petulantly, "Gordon paid two hundred dollars for that single dog; there ought to be something extra to him." Mrs. Berry received this item without signal amazement; it was evident that she was prepared to credit any vagaries to the possessors of Pompey Hollidew's fabulous legacy.
He watched a trout slip lazily out from under the bank, and lie headed upstream, slowly waving its fins. It recalled the trout he had left on the porch of Hollidew's farmhouse on the night when he had attempted to ... seduce ... Lettice! The details of that occasion returned vivid, complete, unsparing.
Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas flashed into his mind Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there were no other children.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking