“Well, maybe you’d trust Horace Hollaby. I’ll pledge the leases with him as security.” Keturah thought it over. There could be no question of Judge Hollaby’s honesty. A $5,000 mortgage coming due in six months was certain to be paid. Meantime, the bank would let her have the money. There would be no profit in it, of course, but curiously enough, for once she was not thinking of that. She was thinking of an interview many years ago, and of how she would love to hurt this man. A desire to pay him off surprised and dominated her. She did not see in the least how it was to be done, but if it was to be done this entrance into business relations with him was necessary and would constitute, in some way not now clear, the first step. “You take the leases up to Judge Hollaby. I’ll go over them with him, and if they’re all right you go to him and get the money,” she directed. And then she thought--hard. XI Keturah Smiley was no fool. When the leases of the oyster beds were made out they were made out in her name, and the Blue Port Bivalve Company had exactly nothing to do with the transaction. Judge Hollaby, purely in his capacity as Miss Smiley’s lawyer, attended to the matter. Purely as Miss Smiley’s lawyer he attended to the details of a loan of $5,000 by Miss Smiley to Richard Hand. Solely as a man, an oldish fellow who had seen a good deal of human nature and knew both parties in the case, he wondered what would happen next. He had not long to wait. The oyster beds were not extensive, but they were the richest in that part of the Great South Bay. Keturah Smiley, deserting Judge Hollaby for the first time in her life, went to a Patchogue lawyer and formed with him the Luscious Oyster Corporation. The Luscious Oyster Corporation took over the leases of the oyster beds held by Keturah Smiley and took an option on a large part of the Smiley land. The Patchogue lawyer held that indiscretion was sometimes the better part of valour. He was very, very indiscreet; he was deliberately and extensively indiscreet. And the world that cared about Blue Port oysters soon knew all the plans and purposes of the Luscious Oyster Corporation. It would build a large factory on Hawkins Creek. Arrangements for special railway trackage were being made. There was plenty of capital back of the new corporation. It had the rights to a new and hitherto unannounced process for making several first-class products from oyster shells. Its oysters, the best, the fattest, the most succulent in all the Great South Bay, would be shipped, opened, in sanitary containers with a distinctive label and carried in refrigerator cars. The shells would be turned over to the factory where, aside from certain novelties and trinkets and toys, vast numbers of them would be used in the composition of a new kind of cement for floors in office buildings and for roofing.