Old rumors, stories, came to Gordon's memory in regard to the long credit extended by Simmons to "old friends," the absence of any rendered accounts; and, in that connection, the thought of the number of homesteads throughout the county that had come, through forced sales, into the storekeeper's hands. The circumstantial details of these events had been bitten by impassioned oaths into his mind, together with the memory of the dreary ruin that had settled upon the evicted. "I can give you something day after to-morrow, when I am paid." "Entirely satisfactory; three hundred--no, for you two hundred and fifty dollars will be sufficient; the rest another time ... whenever you are able." "I get two dollars and fifty cents a day," Gordon reminded him, with a dry and bitter humor, "and I have a month's pay coming." Valentine Simmons had not, apparently, heard him. "Two hundred and fifty only," he repeated; "we always like to accommodate old friends, especially Presbyterian friends." "I can give you fifty dollars," Gordon told him, at once loud and conciliatory; wondering, at the same time, how, if he did, Clare and himself would manage. He had to pay for his board in Stenton; the doctor for Clare had to be met--fifty cents in hand a visit, or the visits ceased. "Have your little joke, then get out that hidden stocking, pry up that particular fire brick ... only two hundred and fifty now ... but--now." A hopeless feeling of impotence enveloped Gordon: the small, dry man before him with the pink, bald head shining in the lamplight, the set grin, was as remote from any appeal as an insensate figure cast in metal, a painted iron man in neat, grey alpaca, a stiff, white shirt with a small blue button and an exact, prim muslin bow. Still, "I'll give you fifty, and thirty the next month. Why, damn it, I'll pay you off in the year. I'm not going to run away. I have steady work; you know what I am getting; you're safe." "But," Valentine Simmons lifted a hand in a round, glistening cuff, "is anything certain in this human vale? Is anything secure that might hang on the swing of a ... whip?" With an unaccustomed, violent effort of will Gordon Makimmon suppressed his angry concern at the other's covert allusion: outside his occupation as stage driver he was totally without resources, without the ability to pay for a bag of Green Goose tobacco. The Makimmons had never been thrifty ... in the beginning they had let their wide share of valley holding grow deep in thicket, where they might hunt the deer, their streams course through a woven wild where pheasant might feed and fall to their accurate guns. "Two hundred and fifty dollars," Valentine Simmons repeated pleasantly.