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Updated: June 20, 2025
"I think I might set your mind at rest on what she owes you," Welborne said, with an unctuous smile. "There is no use beating about the bush, Henley, you know she's in debt to me, and you've come over to see if I can help you out. Well, I can. I am in the shape to do it. Me 'n you have clashed several times in our deals and had hard feelings, but there is no use keeping up strife.
I've been paying old Welborne fifty dollars a year rent fer that little hole in a wall, away back from the square, because I couldn't get enough ahead to build on this lot or get any other shop. I think I've had a stroke of luck, and, strange to say, it come through a woman. Yesterday evening Dixie Hart come in my shop and axed me if I could straighten the heels of her shoes while she set thar.
"Well, it's about my farm," she said, and she paused to steady her voice, which seemed to fail her. "I see," Henley said. "Old Welborne is charging you too high interest. You ought to shift the mortgage to somebody more human somebody with at least a thimbleful of soul. That man is the hardest taskmaster on earth. He'd skin a flea for its hide and tallow." "Mortgage?
He picked out a fifty-dollar one, and talked and talked till he finally got the pore devil down to forty. Then he said: "'You'd sell two for seventy-five, wouldn't you? "'I reckon I might, the undertaker said, 'but you only want one. "'I'll need another 'fore many months, old Welborne said. 'My father-in-law won't last long.
I want to know that a feller is up to snuff and fairly in the game, and then I'll swat 'im if it is in my power. It's been the ambition of my life to get the best of old Welborne across the street there. He's made his pile off of widows and orphans, and if I ever get him under my thumb I'll crack every bone in his hide."
You was gettin' off what you called a good one on old Tight-fist just now by puttin' this chap on his track, and I reckon you'd have no call to git mad if Welborne made it tit for tat an' fired back at you.
"The big rent I've had to pay him on his half has kept my nose to the grindstone, so that I'm even deeper in debt to him now than I was at the start." "Rent?" exclaimed the storekeeper, staring blandly. "Yes, nothing would suit Mr. Welborne but that his part was worth two hundred a year, and he refused right out to trade any other way." A light broke on Henley.
Now, if you just wouldn't think too hard of me, I could sort o' let on to old Welborne, you see, that you was up to your eyes in debt to me, and that that the thing had been running on till I was well, was plumb tired out, and ready to come down on you." "Oh, I see." A faint smile broke over the girl's shrewd face. "Why, I wouldn't care what you did or said, Alfred," she cried.
You are like your daddy was, always looking for trouble, and, somehow, always finding plenty of it, and doing no particular harm to anybody else. He was always going to kill somebody, but never got to it." "Listen to me," Bradley snarled; "if I don't kill that dirty whelp in twenty-four hours from now, I leave home for good and all." "Say, look here," Welborne said, with a change of tone.
"He thinks he's got you under his thumb, and that he'll scare you into accepting his cash. Wait, keep your seat; let me study over it; there must be some way. The Lord Almighty wouldn't let a grasping old skunk like that rob a helpless girl like you. Welborne didn't make you the give-or-take offer in writing I'm sure he didn't; he's too slick for that?"
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