"You're Makimmon," he half queried, half asserted. "I'm Edgar Crandall, Alexander's brother." He took off his hat, and passed his hand in a quick gesture across his brow. He had close-cut, vivid red hair bristling like a helmet over a long, narrow skull, and a thrusting grey gaze. "I came to see you," he continued, "because of what you did for Alec. I can't make out just what it was; but he says you saved his farm, pulled it right out of Cannon's fingers, and that you've given him all the time he needs to pay it back--" He paused. "Well," Gordon responded, "and if I did?" "I studied over it at first," the other frankly admitted; "I thought you must have a string tied to something. I know Alexander's place, it's a good farm, but ... I studied and studied until I saw there couldn't be more in it than what appeared. I don't know why--" "Why should you?" Gordon interrupted brusquely, annoyed by this searching into the reason for his purchase of the farm, into the region of his memories. "I didn't come here to ask questions," the other quickly assured him; "but to borrow four thousand dollars." "Why not forty?" Gordon asked dryly. "Because I couldn't put it out at profit, now." Edgar Crandall ignored the other's factitious manner: "but I can turn four over two or three times in a reasonable period. I can't give you any security, everything's covered I own; that's why I came to you." "You heard I was a fool with some money?" "You didn't ask any security of Alexander," he retorted. "No, I came to you because there was something different in what you did from all I had ever known before. I can't tell what I mean; it had a--well, a sort of big indifference about it. It seemed to me perhaps life hadn't got you in the fix it had most of us; that you were free." "You must think I'm free--with four thousand dollars." "Apples," the other continued resolutely. "I've got the ground, acres of prime sunny slope. I've read about apple growing and talked to men who know. I've been to Albermarle County. I can do the same thing in the Bottom. Ask anybody who knows me if I'll work. I can pay the money back all right. But, if I know you from what you did, that's not the thing to talk about now. "I want a chance," he drove a knotted fist into a hardened palm; "I want a chance to bring out what's in me and in my land. I want my own! The place came to me clear, with a little money; but I wasn't content with a crop of fodder. I improved and experimented with the soil till I found out what was in her. Now I know; but I can't plant a sapling, I can't raise an apple, without binding myself to the Cannons and Hollidews of the County for life. "I'd be their man, growing their fruit, paying them their profits. They would stop at the fence, behind their span of pacers, and watch me--their slave--sweating in the field or orchard."