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In the game now, Smith was to deliver beer and whisky into Wyker's hands. Wyker would do the rest. Whoever opposed him must suffer for his rashness. It was cooler in the large dining-room where Thaine Aydelot and Leigh Shirley had met by chance at noontime.
The boy carried a message also to Darley Champers to meet Jacobs at the top of the hill above Little Wolf where the trail with the scary little twist wound down by the opening to the creek, beyond which the Gimpke home was hidden. Then Hans Wyker, with threats of withholding the circus ticket and the ice cream, was told both messages just as they had been given to him for Rosie and Champers.
"He's here and away, but he never sets foot in Careyville. My guess is that he's a part of the 'Co. of 'Champers and Co. and that Hans Wyker is the rest of it.
His holdings joined the property foreclosed by Wyker when his town failed, but inhabited still by tenants too poor to leave it. The boundary line between Wyker and Jacobs was the same ugly little creek that Doctor Carey had turned his course to avoid on that winter day when he had seen Virginia Aydelot's distress signal and heard her singing a plaintive plea for help.
Thomas Smith's face was ashy and his voice was hoarse with anger as he replied: "Because I'm not now from Wilmington, Delaware, any more than I ever was. I'm from Cloverdale, Ohio. You know, Wyker, how I lost money in your brewery, investing in machinery and starting the thing, only to go to smash on us." He turned on Hans fiercely.
So I coom to Yermany and enlist. Gretchen, she coom too an' she stay der. Vell! I help fight Boxer some. Mine Gott, forgif me. I do once some goot for der world dis day." And that was the last of Wyker. The twilight hour was near. The wounded had been borne away by busy Red Cross angels of mercy.
Then came the crushing calamity, the Prohibitory Law, which put Hans Wyker out of business. And hand in hand with this disaster, when the railroad came at last it drove its steel lines imperiously westward, ignoring Wykerton, with the ugly little canyons of Big Wolf on the north, and the site of Carey's Crossing beside the old blossom-bordered trail on the south.
Eagerness to represent and invest large capital and to make by far the best of a bargain by any means just inside the law were his besetments. But he had not the unremitting hatred that enslaved Thomas Smith and Hans Wyker. Champers' store of energy seemed exhaustless. Following this council he fell upon the Grass River Valley and threshed it to his profit.
But the downfall of Wyker and his interests cut deeper into the interests of the Grass River settlement than anyone dreamed of at the time. It sifted into Wyker's slow brain that the Jew, as he called Jacobs with many profane decorations, had been shrewd as well as selfish when his silent vote had given Wykerton the lead in the race for a county seat location.
"Yes, civil life has its heroes, too," the doctor responded. "She also says," he continued, "that John Jacobs has had Hans Wyker convicted of running a joint and Hans had to pay a fine and stick in the Careyville jail thirty days. Hans won't love John for that when he gets out." "What a hater of whisky John Jacobs is. He's always on the firing line and never misses his aim, bless him!"
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