"Oh, you'll go. You don't want this Y. M. C. A. crowd to know all I can tell. No, you don't. And Jim Shirley and that girl Leigh don't want me to publish all I know about the father and brother, Tank. It might be hard on both of 'em. Oh, I've got you all there. You can't get away from me and think because I'm hard up I have lost my grip on you. _I'll never do that._ I can disgrace you all so Grass River wouldn't wash your names clean again. So run along. You and the Shirleys will do as I say. You don't _dare_ not to. And this pretty Leigh, such a gross old creature as you are fond of, she can work herself to skin and bone to pay off another mortgage to help Jim. Poor fellow can't work like most men, big as he is. I remember when he got started wrong in his lungs back in Ohio when he was a boy. He blamed Tank for shutting him out in the cold one night, or something like it. That give him his start. He always blamed Tank for everything. Why, he and Tank had a fight the last time they were together, and he nearly broke his brother's arm off--" "Oh, shut up," Champers snapped out. "Well, be active. I'll give you till tomorrow night; that's ample," Smith snapped back. "Hans and you are all the people in town who know I'm here now except the fat woman who waits on the table at Wyker's. I'm lying low right now, but I won't stay hid long; Wyker'll keep me over one more day, I reckon. Even he's turned against me when I've got no money to loan him, but I'll be on my feet again." "Say, Smith, come in tomorrow night, but don't hurry away now." The big man's tone was too level to show which way his meaning ran. "I'd like to go into matters a little with you." Smith settled back in his chair and waited with the air of one not to be coaxed. "You are right in sayin' I'd like to hide some transactions. Not many real estate men went through the boom days here who don't need to feel that way. We was all property mad, and you and me and Wyker run our bluff same as any of 'em, an' we busted the spirit of the law to flinders. And our givin' and gettin' deeds and our buyin' tax titles an' forty things we done, was so irregular it might or mightn't stand in court now, dependin' altogether on how good a lawyer for technicalities we was able to employ. We know'd the game we was playin', too, and excused ourselves, thinkin' the Lord wouldn't find us special among so many qualified for the same game. Smith, I know danged well I'm not so 'shamed of that as I should be. The thing that hurts me wouldn't be cards for you at all. It's the brutal, inhumane things no law can touch me for; it's trying to do honest men out'n their freeholds; it's holdin' back them grasshopper sufferer supplies, an' havin' the very men I robbed treatin' me like a gentleman now, that's cutting my rhinoceros hide into strips and hangin' it on the fence. But you can't capitalize a thing like that in your business." "Well, I know what I can do."