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Cold and weeks of semi-starvation, anxiety, excitement, and drenched garments had done the little man to death, and he lay raging with fever and stabbed with pain at each indrawn breath, tossing and gasping and burning, but thinking only of Linthicum and the herds and the scraps of paper which were to bring him five hundred dollars.
Abner Linthicum was hard upon him, and was not in the least touched by seeing his meagre little face grow sharper and his garments hang looser upon his small frame. "You'll fat on the herds," he would say, with practical jocularity, and Mr. Stamps grinned feebly, his thin lips stretching themselves over hungry teeth. The little man burned with the fever of his chase.
Gathered on the platform were the foremost citizens of Baltimore, the ablest men in Maryland, including Mayor J. H. Preston, Douglas Thomas, Frank A. Furst, U. S. Senator John Walter Smith, Hon. J. Charles Linthicum, ex-Gov. Edwin Warfield, Col. Ral Parr, John W. Frick, John M. Dennis, Douglas H. Gordon, John E. Hurst, Franklin P. Cator, Capt. I. E. Emerson, Hon. Wm.
His shifty eyes burned uncannily, his physical and mental fever were too much for him. Linthicum had just left him before Latimer arrived, and upon the production of five hundred dollars rested the fate of the claim for the herds. "Ef ye'll bring the money cash down next Saturday," he said, "I'll give ye the papers. I'll hev 'em yere by then.
He had often studied the handwriting, and believed if he had seen it again he should know it. It was small but strong and characteristic, though that was not what he had called it. "Ef I'd hed more time an' could hev worked it out more an' got him to write suthin' down I could hev hed more of a hold," he said, plaintively, "but Linthicum wouldn't give me no time."
Abner Linthicum, of Vermont, had enjoyed several successes in connection with two or three singular claims which he had "put through" with the aid of genius combined with a peculiar order of executive ability. They had not been large claims, but he had "put them through" when other agents had declined to touch them.
"It's all I kin scrape, Linthicum," he said to that gentleman. "I kin get a few dollars more if Minty kin sell her crop o' corn an' send me the money but this is every cent I kin give ye now. Won't it do nothin'?" "No, it won't," answered the claim agent, with a final sort of shrug. "We're dealing with a business that's got to be handled well or it'll all end in smoke.
To lie and listen for his visitor's footsteps upon the stairs to lie until seven o'clock if he did not come till then, would be more than he could endure. That would give him too long to think over what Linthicum would do if the whole sum were not forthcoming to think of the reasons why the parson might make up his mind to treat the letters as if they were worthless.
He lay and gnawed his finger-nails anew. "I wouldn't give nothin' for 'em ef I was in his place," he muttered. "Ef thar'd been anythin' in 'em that proved anythin' I should hev used 'em long sence. But then I'm a business man an' he's a parson, an' doesn't know nothin' about the laws. But he might go to some man say a man like Linthicum who could put him up to things.
I have had to ask men for a thousand dollars at a time and the thing they were working was easier to be done than this is." "A thousand dollars!" cried Stamps. He grew livid and a lump worked in his throat, as if he was going to cry. "A thousand dollars 'ud buy me and sell me twice over, Mr. Linthicum." "I'm not asking you for a thousand dollars yet," said Linthicum.
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