"What do you want now? We've got no business with each other except as I am agent for your rents and mortgages." "You seem to fatten on them, or something," Smith answered insinuatingly. "You lose no flesh with the years, I see." "I've little occasion to worry," Darley Champers replied meaningly. "Not with a fat income like yours and small returns to your employer who's kept you all these years," Smith began, but Darley Champers mentally blew up. It was in the bluffer's game that he always succeeded best. "Now, see here, dang you. Get to business. You and Wyker and me dissolved partnership long ago. I've been your agent years and years. I've did my best. I never got so rich you could notice it on my breath. I'm not a thief nor a murderer. I keep inside the law. I broke with you fellows years ago, except straight contract that'll probate in any court. You are a bully in power and a coward out of it. What the devil do you want with me? I'm no bank. Be clear and quick about it and quit your infernal dodgin' human beins like a cut-throat. I've signed your name to no end of papers for you when you wouldn't put your own left-handed writin' in sight. I have your written permit safe for doin' it. I reckon somebody must a' put that right hand of yours out of commission sometime. I'll find out about it one of these days myself." Thomas Smith sat looking at the speaker with steady gaze. Many lines crossed his countenance now, but the crooked scar had not faded with time. In a coffin his would be the face of an old man. Alive, it was so colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a man in hard lines financially. "I want money and I want it quick, or I'd not come clear out here. And you are going to get it for me. That Cloverdale quarter I've held grown to weeds so long you will sell to the first buyer now. Jim Shirley's at the last of his string. I did what I wanted to do with him. He'll never own a quarter again," Smith spoke composedly. "Yes, I guess you're right. You've done him to his ruin. Jacobs has a mortgage on his home, too, and a Jew's a Jew. He'll close on Jim with a snap yet. It won't be the first time he's done it," Darley Champers declared. "And that niece, Tank's girl, he was to protect for Alice Leigh?" Smith asked. "Oh, eventually she'll either marry some hired man, I reckon, or go to sewin' or something like it for a livin'. She's a danged pretty girl now, but girls fade quick," Champers said. For just one instant something like remorse swept Smith's face. Then he hardened again as the ruling passion asserted itself. "Serves her right," he said in a tone so brutal that Champers remembered it.