"It's no use asking _you_, that's plain," said Steven bitterly. "I want my money." In spite of him, his voice raised and cracked on the last words. He turned to the doctor pleadingly. "John," he said, "it ain't right--it ain't right. You'll say it ain't right, when you hear. Tell him it ain't right, John, _tell_ him it ain't." He pointed to Gwynne with his shaking hand. The younger man scowled back with a resentment touched by some feeling not far removed from shame; Doctor Vardaman looked at him in open inquiry, and was confounded to see that Gwynne avoided his eye. "You'd better sit down here quietly, Steve, old man," he said kindly. "Now what is it you want me to tell Gwynne? Let's thrash it all out. We'll put it straight in five minutes, I've no doubt." He shook his head warningly at Gwynne behind the other's back; and Gwynne set his lips ominously and looked away. Old Steven began to fumble in his pockets; in his excitement he could not command his stiff trembling fingers, and cursed with impatience as he sought. "I've got it here--I've got a statement, Jack," he explained twice or thrice. "I put it all down. I may not be a pin-headed, pettifogging little know-it-all attorney," he said with a withering side-glance at Gwynne standing against the mantelpiece in a morose silence. "But I guess I can add up a column of figures and make it come out right just the same." Doctor Vardaman might have laughed at another time; but now he was too concerned for the outcome, feeling instinctively that, at its core, this was no laughing matter. The presentiment chilled him into gravity as he watched Steven turn out a collection of rubbish such as any schoolboy might have owned--broken bits of slate-pencil, a disabled toothbrush, hanks of cotton string, a handful of Indian corn and one of loose tobacco, numerous buttons, a large red apple--"I brought that for Gwynne, but now I'll give it to _you_, John," said the old man severely. Finally from the midst of this dunnage he produced a creased and soiled paper and spread it out triumphantly. "There, Jack, there, I wrote it all out. 'William Pallinder, Esquire'--no, I'll be damned if I call him 'esquire,' it's too good for him--lend me your pen-knife, Jack, I'll scratch it out when I get through reading--'William Pallinder in account with Steven Gwynne _et al._--I remember that out of the books when I was studying law--_et al._, for house-rent due from November, 1881, to March, 1883, sixteen months, at one hundred and fifty dollars a month, twenty-four hundred dollars--ain't that correct? And there's twenty of us, you know, John, counting Eleanor and Mollie's share as one, twenty goes into twenty-four once and four over--I put that down on another piece of paper--I can't find it, but I remember anyhow--twenty into twenty-four once and four over, twenty into forty goes twice, and ought's ought, and _ought's ought_. That's a hundred and twenty