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Of this he was as certain in his own mind as if he had seen the gambler lift hand for the blow. Boyle had no motive for it up to that time, although he had been quick to turn the circumstance to his advantage. "I thought Boyle'd dickered you out of this claim before now," said Shanklin, looking around warily.
The latter was present by sufferance, not because he was wanted or invited, but because he felt inclined for a good supper, and was sharp enough to know that neither of his employers could afford to fall out with him just then. "Well, how goes it?" said Mr Shanklin. "You've had a run lately, and no mistake." "Yes, I flatter myself we've done pretty well.
That was coming, she knew. She had to submit to it. But she would never entreat it or make friends with it. Blind, with her face shut hard and blind, she was pushed towards the door. The days passed, the weeks, the months. Sometimes, in the sunny afternoons, she seemed almost happy. "I try to think of the nice times when we went to Mablethorpe, and Robin Hood's Bay, and Shanklin," she said.
"What have you been doing all afternoon?" the woman asked, as she came up. "Talking, mamma," the little girl replied "I've had a very interesting time." Ross Shanklin scrambled to his feet and stood watchfully and awkwardly. The little girl took the mother's hand, and she, in turn, looked at him frankly and pleasantly, with a recognition of his humanness that was a new thing to him.
Mr Shanklin, it was evident, could appreciate honesty in any one else. He was highly delighted with what he had seen of the new secretary. If anything could float the Select Agency Corporation, the lad's unsuspicious honesty would do it. In fact, things were looking up all round for the precious confederates.
"Well, there's a little more of the story, it seems, after all. There was a plot between Shanklin and another to file Peterson on a certain tract and then buy him out, I suppose." He told her of the telegram signed "Jerry," and of Shanklin's reply. "So I concluded," he said, "that if the land described by their numbers was valuable to them it would be valuable to me.
One Thursday in June, several years later, Major Gilcrest was returning from a business trip which had called him to a distant county. His road led him by a little log schoolhouse on the banks of Shanklin Creek. Here he found a meeting in progress in the locust grove surrounding the schoolhouse.
He had been farmed out as a chattel by the state to the contractors. He had been trailed through swamps by bloodhounds. Twice he had been shot. For six years on end he had cut a cord and a half of wood each day in a convict lumber camp. Sick or well, he had cut that cord and a half or paid for it under a whip-lash knotted and pickled. And Ross Shanklin had not sweetened under the treatment.
Young Ross Shanklin had toiled terribly in jail; he had escaped, more than once; and he had been caught and sent back to toil in other and various jails. He had been triced up and lashed till he fainted had been revived and lashed again. He had been in the dungeon ninety days at a time. He had experienced the torment of the straightjacket. He knew what the humming bird was.
That must have been the very spot of its location, with the divided wall of the tent back of him, through which he had disappeared on the night that Walker lost his money and Shanklin dropped his dice. Of course. That was the explanation. The little cube in Slavens' palm was one of Shanklin's honest dice, with which he tolled on the suckers. He had lost one of them in his precipitate retreat. Dr.