“You’ve been talking a lot of bally rot about your duty to these people—seeing that we wouldn’t rob them in the price we paid for the land or the oil leases. You know mighty well we can go down there and lease a whole farm a hundred years for a dollar. Now, you can crab our whole act—that’s easy to see—if you go down there and tell those people they’re fools, and that they ought to have two dollars an acre for their oil rights—more’n we’ve paid them for _all_ their coal and their timber and their land any time these last twenty years! You can see easily enough from the class of men I’ve shown you here last night that we’ve got all the money we need, all the money that anybody needs to pay for what we want. But we want loyalty. We want service. We want someone to stand with us, thick or thin, right or _wrong_. Do you understand?” Joslin looked at the puffy face of the man who spoke, his heavy cheeks, his thickening neck, his watery eyes, somewhat reddened about the rims. He replied slowly. “Yes, Mr. Haddon, I reckon I do understand,” said he. “Well, well, then, what about it? Do you find New York such a poor place to live in? Isn’t there anything here to light you up a little bit more than anything you ever saw down in the Cumberlands?” Joslin looked at him, his pale face going still paler. “I’ve seen things here I didn’t know was in all the world. But ye wasn’t asking me to sell out my own people, was ye?” “There you go again!” retorted the irritated man across the table from him. “Rot! I’ve told you the question of right or wrong don’t come into business at all. Business is _business_. Highbrow things don’t come into it at all. Don’t you want to know what life is—don’t you want to branch out—don’t you want to see what the world has—all the people in it, the _life_ of it? Why, man, at first you looked to me as though you weren’t a sissy or a simp.” The moisture on Joslin’s forehead meant nothing to the man who faced him, who knew nothing of the self-loathing, the self-reproach, that lay in Joslin’s heart. “Well, anyhow, if you lived in this country for a while you might change your point of view,” finished Haddon, pushing back his chair. “What’s your hurry, getting out of town? You haven’t got a cent to your name, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what to do. I’m sorry for you——” “Ye needn’t be,” said David Joslin. “Ye kain’t pity a mounting man—he won’t have it!” “Hell’s bells!” ejaculated the irate man whom he addressed. “I’m not trying to change any of those damned hill-billies down there. That’s not the question. I put it up to you that you’re here in New York, and you’ve got a chance to save up a little money to _buy_ your bally old education. You don’t have to lose any of your principles. It’s just _making good_—that’s all there is to it. If you want to make good you’re on. If you don’t—good-by!”