He said to me often that nothing was so distasteful to him as wrangles over business affairs, as if nothing in the world was so important as the possession of money, and that he allowed himself to be robbed rather than dispute and quarrel, which knowledge I am afraid his customers often used to their own advantage. His business remained profitable, I also heard him say, because he had to keep busy to avoid self-destruction, and that motive seemed to succeed quite as well as the nobler one of ambition. If he came to the house, and met my mother, her painful condition had a bad effect upon him, so that he finally avoided her, usually coming to the office in the evenings when he knew I should be there. I think she never knew he was in trouble, for I never told her, and she seldom talked to any one else, though she must have wondered at the remarkable change in his manner, for he had grown nervous to a painful degree, and looked anxiously about like a hunted man. Usually when he came to Twin Mounds he had no other errand than to be with me for a few hours; at these times he would go over his painful story in detail, and, in explaining his wretchedness, try to justify himself, talking of it in such a pitiful way that I became nervous myself in trying to devise some way out of the difficulty. He talked a great deal of how the people would blame him if they knew the story; how they would say his brain was softening, or that he ought to be sent to an asylum, and then he would put the case to me again, and ask me to judge if his trouble was not justified. I always believed that it was, more because I knew that my friend, a man of promise, was in distress, than because I had impartially judged it, and so I always told him, but this gave him little satisfaction, for he said that in my friendship for him perhaps I did not do Mateel the justice she deserved. When the weather was fine, I drove him home at night, and I think we always met Bragg driving toward the town. Except that he was more of a dog than ever, there was little change in the fellow, and he moped about in his usual listless fashion, doing nothing but mischief, and occasionally becoming maudlin from drinking out of his bottle. He probably watched Jo’s coming that he might meet him on the road as an annoyance, and I always trembled when I saw them meet, for Jo’s hatred for him was intense, and he would have been delighted with the slightest excuse to beat him.