“I’ll tell you how this is, Mr. Queeder,” he said after a time. “It looks to me as though this fellow, whoever he is, has given you a little the worst end of this bargain. Your land is worth much more than that, that’s plain enough. But you can get out of that easily enough on the ground that you really didn’t know what you were selling at the time you made this bargain. That’s the law, I believe. You don’t have to stick by an agreement if it’s made when you don’t understand what you’re doing. As a matter of fact, I think I could get you out of it if you wanted me to. All you would have to do would be to refuse to sign any other papers when the time comes and return the money that’s been paid you. Then when the time came I would be glad to take over your whole farm at three hundred dollars an acre and pay cash down. That would make you a rich man. I’d give you three thousand cash in hand the day you signed an agreement to sell. The trouble is you were just taken in. You and your wife really didn’t know what you were doing.” “That’s right,” squeaked Queeder, “we wuz. We didn’t ’low ez they wuz any min’l on this when we signed that air contrack.” Three hundred dollars an acre, as he dumbly figured it out, meant $21,000—twenty-one instead of a wretched eight thousand! For the moment he stood there quite lost as to what to do, say, think, a wavering, element-worn figure. His bent and shriveled body, raked and gutted by misfortune, fairly quivered with the knowledge that riches were really his for the asking, yet also that now, owing to his early error and ignorance in regard to all this, he might not be able to arrange for their reception. His seared and tangled brain, half twisted by solitude, balanced unevenly with the weight of this marvelous possibility. It crossed the wires of his mind and made him see strabismically. The prospector, uncertain as to what his silence indicated, added: “I might even do a little better than that, Mr. Queeder—say, twenty-five thousand. You could have a house in the city for that. Your wife could wear silk dresses; you yourself need never do another stroke of work; your son and daughter could go to college if they wanted to. All you have to do is to refuse to sign that deed when he comes back—hand him the money or get his address and let me send it to him.” “He swindled me, so he did!” Queeder almost shouted now, great beads of sweat standing out upon his brow. “He tried tuh rob me! He shan’t have an acre, by God—not an acre!” “That’s right,” said the newcomer, and before he left he again insinuated into the farmer’s mind the tremendous and unfair disproportion between twelve (as he understood Queeder was receiving) and twenty-five thousand. He pictured the difference in terms of city or town opportunities, the ease of his future life.