OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit that Mr. Herman Felsburg's pair were the most humorous legs. When it came to legs—funny legs—the palm was his without a struggle. Casting up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent, pigeon-toed.

I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg's legs first acquired for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.

I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning glory and balsam-apple vines.

I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.

I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that they were not such very old men—then. They are old enough now—such of them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the season always is summer—late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy summer day.

It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest's front porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our town—its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely epics. There I heard the story of Singin' Sandy Riggs, who, like Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I don't suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a friendless life.

And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it—because, of course, witches were immune to slugs of lead—and on the night after the day when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry's cabin and fired through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap, mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her—and he was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They had to be—or else go hungry frequently.

When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry's cabin and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see them burn. Mind you, this didn't happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United States.

There were certain men, though—leaders of opinion and action in the rough young community—who did not altogether hold with the theory that the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more importance than its rescued owner.

There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge Priest's front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town we still know him by no other title.

Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before he would even invade Judge Priest's chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still, he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.

When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mocking birds took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest's chimney would go whooshing up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old sitting room below.

Sprawled in his favourite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures—a small boy—rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he felt like laughing—at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it that I took it down without tasting it.

As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated with promise of more heat to-morrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed. I don't know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening—he lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy's instinctive appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of Mr. Felsburg's legs. I don't recall now just what it was I said, but I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that came into Judge Priest's chubby round face.

“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased with me. He didn't scold me, though—only he peered at me over his glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin mebbe you're right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin' pair of laigs, ain't he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain't been treated kindly, don't they? Whut was it you said they favoured—horse collars, wasn't it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:

“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there should be a war comin' along, and you should git drawed into it someway, jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places and into ez many hard-fit fights as I've saw them little crookedy laigs takin' that little man, you won't have no call to feel ashamed of 'em—not even ef yours should be so twisted you'd have to walk backward in order to go furward.”

At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or the other in the Big War—mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business. Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So——

“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.

“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.

“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.

“Ez a reg'lar sure-nuff soldier.”

I considered for a moment.

“Why, he's Jewish, ain't he, Judge?” I asked next.

“So fur as my best information and belief go, he's practically exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.

“But I didn't think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”

I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.

“Didn't you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don't you?”

“Oh, yes, sir—every Sunday—nearly.”

“Well, didn't you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named Goliath?”

“Yes, sir; but——”

“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”

“I know, sir; but—but that was so long ago!”

“It was quite a spell back, and that's a fact,” agreed Judge Priest. “Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein' human nature. You'll be findin' that out, son, when you git a little further along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn't they—at that there Sunday school?”

I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period Samson was, with me, a favourite character in history. By reason of his recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam and General N. B. Forrest.

“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a fighter, takin' one thing with another, wasn't he? Remember hearin' about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I don't know how many of them old Philistines?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple right smack down and killed everybody!”

“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin' of that circumstance too. I expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighbourhood.”

I can hear the old Judge saying this, and I can see—across the years—the quizzical little wrinkles bunching at the corners of his eyes.

He sat a minute looking down at me and smiling.

“Samson was much of a man—and he was a Jew.”

“Was he?” I was shocked in a new place.

“That's jest exactly what he was. And there was a man oncet named Judas—not the Judas you've heared about, but a feller with the full name of Judas MaccabÆus; and he was such a pert hand at fightin' they called him the Hammer of the Jews. Judgin' by whut I've been able to glean about him, his enemies felt jest as well satisfied ef they could hear, before the hostilities started, that Judas was laid up sick in bed somewheres. It taken considerable of a load off their minds, ez you might say.

“But—jest as you was sayin', son, about David—it's been a good while since them parties flourished. When we look back on it, it stretches all the way frum here to B. C.; and that's a good long stretch, and a lot of things have been happenin' meantime. But I sometimes git to thinkin' that mebbe little Herman Felsburg has got some of that old-time Jew fightin' blood in his veins. Anyhow, he belongs to the same breed. No, sirree, sonny; it don't always pay to judge a man by his laigs. You kin do that with reguards to a frog or a grasshopper, or even sometimes with a chicken; but not with a man. It ain't the shape of 'em that counts—it's where they'll take you in time of trouble.”

He cocked his head down at me—I saying nothing at all. There didn't seem to be anything for me to say; so I maintained silence and he spoke on:

“You jest bear that in mind next time you feel moved to talk about laigs. And ef it should happen to be Mister Felsburg's laigs that you're takin' fur your text, remember this whut I'm tellin' you now: They may be crooked; but, son, there ain't no gamer pair of laigs nowheres in this world. I've seen 'em carry in' him into battle when, all the time, my knees was knockin' together, the same ez one of these here end men in a minstrel show knocks his bones together. His laigs may 'a' trembled a little bit too—I ain't sayin' they didn't—but they kept right on promenadin' him up to where the trouble was; and that's the main p'int with a set of shanks. You jest remember that.”

Being sufficiently humbled I said I would remember it.

“There's still another thing about Herman Felsburg's laigs that most people round here don't know, neither,” added Judge Priest when I had made my pledge: “All up and down the back sides of his calves, and clear down on his shins, there's a whole passel of little red marks. There's so many of them little scars that they look jest like lacework on his skin.”

“Did he get them in the war?” I inquired eagerly, scenting a story.

“No; he got them before the war came along,” said Judge Priest. “Some of these times, sonny, when you're a little bit older, I'll tell you a tale about them scars on Mr. Felsburg's laigs. There ain't many besides me that knows it.”

“Couldn't I hear it now?” I asked.

“I reckin you ain't a suitable age to understand—y it,” said Judge Priest. “I reckin we'd better wait a few years. But I won't for-git—I'll tell you when the time's ripe. Anyhow, there's somethin' else afoot now—somethin' that ought to interest a hongry boy.”

I became aware of his house servant—Jeff Poindexter—standing in the hall doorway, waiting until his master concluded whatever he might be saying in order to make an important announcement.

“All right, Jeff!” said Judge Priest. “I'll be there in a minute.” Then, turning to me: “Son-boy, hadn't you better stay here fur supper with me? I expect there's vittles enough fur two. Come on—I'll make Jeff run over to your house and tell your mother I kept you to supper with me.”

After that memorable supper with Judge Priest—all the meals I ever took as his guest were memorable events and still are—ensues a lapse, to be measured by years, before I heard the second chapter of what might be called the tale of Mr. Felsburg's legs. I heard it one evening in the Judge's sitting room.

A squeak had come into my voice, and there was a suspicion of down—a mere trace, as the chemists say—on my upper lip. I was in the second week of proud incumbency of my first regular job. I had gone to work on the Daily Evening News—the cubbiest of cub reporters, green as a young gourd, but proud as Potiphar over my new job and my new responsibilities. This time it was professional duty rather than the social instinct that took me to the old Judge's house.

I had been charged by my editor to get from him divers litigatious facts relating to a decision he had that day rendered in the circuit court where he presided. The information having been vouchsafed, the talk took a various trend. Somewhere in the course of it Mr. Felsburg's name came up and my memory ran back like a spark along a tarred string to that other day when he had promised to relate to me an episode connected with certain small scars on those two bandy legs of our leading clothing merchant.

The present occasion seemed fitting for hearing this long-delayed narrative. I reminded my host of his olden promise; and between puffs at his corncob pipe he told me the thing which I retell here and now, except that, for purposes of convenience, I have translated the actual wording of it out of Judge Priest's vernacular into my own.

So doing, it devolves upon me, first off, to introduce into the main theme a character not heretofore mentioned—a man named Thomas Albritton, a farmer in our country, and at one period a prosperous one. He lived, while he lived—for he has been dead a good while now—six miles from town, on the Massac Creek Road. He lived there all his days. His father before him had cleared the timber off the land and built the two-room log house of squared logs, with the open “gallery” between. With additions, the house grew in time to be a rambling, roomy structure, but from first to last it kept its identity; and even after the last of the old tenants died off or moved off, and new tenants moved in, it was still known as the Albritton place. For all I know to the contrary, it yet goes by that name.

From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded breed—people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better off than most of his neighbours.

Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by mortgages.

It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By local standards of those days he was rich—very rich. To me, then, it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest undeceived me.

When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honourable service as a private soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had enlisted, he owned of this world's goods just the rags he stood in, plus a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude for barter and trade.

Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meagre capital of a few dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites. He prospered—it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike, over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his growing business.

Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers' Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at Felsburg Brothers' you simply could not find it anywhere—that was all. It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and the county-fair grounds.

The multitudinous affairs of the industry he had founded did not engage the energies of the busy little man with the funny legs to the exclusion of other things. As the saying goes, he branched out. He didn't speculate—he was too conservative for that; but where there seemed a chance to invest an honest dollar with a reasonable degree of certainty of getting back, say, a dollar-ten in due time, he invested. Some people called it luck, which is what some people always call it when it turns out so; but, whether it was luck or just foresight, whatsoever he touched seemed bound to flourish and beget dividends.

Eventually, as befitting one who had risen to be a commanding figure in the commercial affairs of the community, Mr. Felsburg became an active factor in its financial affairs. As a stockholder, the Commonwealth Bank welcomed him to its hospitable midst. Soon it saw its way clear to making him a director and vice president. There was promise of profit in the use of his name. Printed on the letterheads, it gave added solidity and added substantiality to the bank's roster. People liked him too. Behind his short round back they might gibe at the shape of his legs, and laugh at his ways of butchering up the English language and twisting up the metaphors with which he besprinkled his everyday walk and conversation; but, all the same, they liked him.

So, in his orbit Mr. Herman Felsburg went up and up to the very peaks of prominence; and while he did this, that other man I have mentioned—Thomas Albritton—went down and down until he descended to the very bottom of things.

In the fullness of time the lines of these two crossed, for it was at the Commonwealth Bank that Albritton negotiated the first and, later, the second of his loans upon his homestead. Indeed, it was Mr. Felsburg who both times insisted that Albritton be permitted to borrow, even though, when the matter of making the second mortgage came up, another director, who specialised in county property, pointed out that, to begin with, Albritton wasn't doing very well; and that, in the second place, the amount of his indebtedness already was as much and very possibly more than as much as the farm would bring at forced sale.

Even though the bank bought it in to protect itself—and in his gloomy mind's eye this director foresaw such a contingency—it might mean a cash loss; but Mr. Felsburg stood pat; and, against the judgment of his associates, he had his way about it. Subsequently, when Mr. Felsburg himself offered to relieve the bank of all possibility of an ultimate deficit by buying Albritton's paper, the rest of the board felt relieved. Practically by acclamation he was permitted to do so.

Of this, however, the borrower knew nothing at all, Mr. Felsburg having made it a condition that his purchase should be a private transaction. So far as the borrower's knowledge went, he owed principal and interest to the bank. There was no reason why Albritton should suspect that Mr. Herman Felsburg took any interest, selfish or otherwise, in his affairs, or that Mr. Felsburg entertained covetous designs upon his possessions. Mr. Felsburg wasn't a money lender. He was a clothing merchant. And Albritton wasn't a business man—his present condition, stripped as he was of most of his inheritance, and with the remaining portion heavily encumbered, gave ample proof of that.

Besides, the two men scarcely knew each other. Albritton was an occasional customer at the Oak Hall. But, for the matter of that, so was nearly everybody else in Red Gravel County; and when he came in to make a purchase it was never the senior member of the firm but always one of the clerks who served him. At such times Mr. Felsburg, from the back part of the store, would watch Mr. Albritton steadily. He never approached him, never offered to speak to him; but he watched him.

One day, not so very long after the date when Mr. Felsburg privately took over the mortgages on the Albritton place, Albritton drove in with a load of tobacco for the Buckner & Keys Warehouse; and, leaving his team and loaded wagon outside, he went into the Oak Hall to buy something. Adolph Dreifus, one of the salesmen, waited on him as he often had before.

The owners of the establishment were at the moment engaged in conference in the rear of the store. Mr. Ike Felsburg was urging, with all the eloquence at his command, the advisability of adding a line of trunks and suit cases to the stock—a venture which he personally strongly favoured—when he became aware that his brother was not heeding what he had to say. Instead of heeding, Mr. Herman was peering along a vista of counters and garment racks to where Adolph Dreifus stood on one side of a show case and Tom Albritton stood on the other. There was a queer expression on Mr. Felsburg's face. His eyes were squinted and his tongue licked at his lower lip.

“Hermy,” said the younger man, irritated that his brother's attention should go wandering afar while a subject of such importance was under discussion, “Hermy, would you please be so good as to listen to me what I am saying to you?”

There was no answer. Mr. Herman continued to stare straight ahead. Mr. Ike raised his voice impatiently:

“Hermy!”

The older man turned on him with such suddenness that Mr. Ike almost slipped off the stool upon which he was perched.

“What's the idea—yelling in my ear like a graven image?” demanded Mr. Herman angrily. “Do you think maybe I am deef or something?”

“But, Hermy,” complained Mr. Ike, “you ain't listening at all. Twice now I have to call you; in fact, three times.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Herman with elaborate sarcasm. “I suppose you think I got nothing whatever at all to do except I should listen to you? If I should spend all my time listening to you where would this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium be? I should like to ask you that. Gabble, gabble, gabble all day long—that is you! Me, I don't talk so much; but I do some thinking.”

“But this is important, what I am trying to tell you, Hermy. Why should you be watching yonder, with a look on your face like as if you would like to bite somebody? Adolph Dreifus ain't so dumb in the head but what he could sell a pair of suspenders or something without your glaring at him every move what he makes.”

“Did I say I was looking at Adolph Dreifus?” asked Mr. Herman truculently.

“Well, then, if you ain't looking at Adolph, why should you look so hard at that Albritton fellow? He don't owe us any money, so far as I know. For what he gets he pays cash, else we positively wouldn't let him have the goods. I've seen you acting like this before, Hermy. Every time that Albritton comes in this place you drop whatever you are doing and hang round and hang round, watching him. I noticed it before; and I should like to ask——”

“Mister Ikey Felsburg,” said Mr. Herman slowly, “if you could mind your own business I should possibly be able to mind mine. Remember this, if you please—I look at who I please. You are too nosey and you talk too damn much with your mouth! I am older than what you are; and I tell you this—a talking jaw gathers no moss. Also, I would like to know, do my eyes belong to me or do they maybe belong to you, and you have just loaned 'em to me for a temporary accommodation?”

“But, Hermy——”

“Ike, shut up!”

And Mr. Ike, warned by the tone in his brother's voice, shut up.

One afternoon, perhaps six months after this passage between the two partners, Mr. Herman crossed the street from the Oak Hall to the Commonwealth Bank to make a deposit.

Through his wicket window Herb Kivil, the cashier, spoke to him, lowering his voice: “Oh, Mr. Felsburg; you remember that Albritton matter you were speaking to me about week before last?”

Mr. Felsburg nodded.

“Well, the last interest payment is more than a month overdue now; and, on top of that, Albritton still owes the payment that was due three months before that. There's not a chance in the world of his being able to pay up. He practically admitted as much when he was in here last, asking for more time. So I've followed your instructions in the matter.”

“That's a good boy, Herby—a very good boy,” said Mr. Felsburg, seemingly much gratified. “You wrote him, then, like I told you?”

“Yes, sir; I wrote him. Yesterday I served notice on him by mail that we would have to go ahead and foreclose right away. So this morning he called me up by telephone from out in the country and asked us to hold off, please, until he could come in here and talk the thing over again.”

“Does he think maybe he can pay his just debts with talk?” inquired Mr. Felsburg.

“Well, if he does I'll mighty soon undeceive him,” said Kivil. “And yet I can't help but feel sorry for the poor devil—he's had an awful run of luck, by all accounts. But here's the thing I mainly wanted to speak to you about: You see, he still thinks the bank holds these mortgages. He doesn't know you bought 'em from the bank; and what I wanted to ask you was this: Do you want me to tell him the truth when he comes in, or would you rather I waited and let him find it out for himself when the foreclosure goes through and the sheriff takes possession?”

“Don't do neither one,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “You should call him up right away and tell him to come in to see about it to-morrow at ten o'clock. And then, Herby, when he does come in, you should tell him he should step over to the Oak Hall and see me in my office. That's all what you should tell him. I got reasons of my own why I should prefer to break the news to him myself. Understand, Herby?”

“I understand, Mr. Felsburg,” said Mr. Kivil. “The minute he steps in here—before he's had time to open up the subject—I'm to send him over to see you. Is that right?”

“That's exactly right, Herby.” And, with pleased puckers at the corners of his eyes, Mr. Felsburg turned away and went stumping out.

Physically Mr. Felsburg didn't in the least suggest a cat, and yet, after he was gone, Cashier Kivil found himself likening Mr. Felsburg to a cat with long claws—a cat that would play a long time with a captive mouse before killing it. He turned to his assistant, Emanuel Moon.

“What's bred in the bone is bound to show sooner or later,” said Herb Kivil sagely. “I never thought of it before—but I guess there must be a mighty mean streak in Mr. Felsburg somewheres. I know this much: I'd hate mightily to owe him any money. Did you see that look on his face? He looked like a regular little old Shylock. I'll bet you he takes his pound of flesh every pop—with an extra half pound or so thrown in for good measure.” Long before ten o'clock the following morning Mr. Felsburg sat waiting in his little cubicle of a private office on the mezzanine floor at the back of the Oak Hall. He kept taking out his watch and looking at it. About ten minutes past the hour one of the clerks climbed the stairs to tell him that Mr. Thomas Albritton, from out in the Massac Creek neighbourhood, was below, asking to see him.

“All right,” said Mr. Felsburg; “you should send him up here to me right away. Tell him I said, please, he should step this way.”

Presently, the clunk of heavy feet sounding on the steps, Mr. Felsburg reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the man for whom he waited—a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the world for being a failure. The yellow dust of country roads was thick, like powdered sulphur, in the wrinkles of his shoes and the creases of his shabby old coat. He had his hat in his hand.

“Good mornin', Mr. Felsburg,” he said.

“Morning!”

Mr. Felsburg returned the greeting with a sharp and businesslike brevity. He did not invite the caller to seat himself. In the small room there was but one chair—the one that held Mr. Felsburg's short form. So, during the early part of the scene that followed, Albritton continued to stand, while Mr. Felsburg enjoyed the advantage of being seated and at his ease where, without stirring, he might, from beneath his lowered brows, look the other up and down.

“I've just come from over at the Commonwealth Bank,” said Albritton, fumbling his hat. “I came in to see about getting an extension on my loans, and Mr. Kivil, over there, said I was to come on over here and talk to you first. He said you wanted to see me 'bout something—if I understood him right.”

Mr. Felsburg nodded in affirmation of this, but made no other reply. Albritton, having halted for a moment, went on again:

“I suppose you want to talk to me about my affairs, you being a director of the bank?”

“And also, furthermore, vice president,” supplemented Mr. Felsburg.

“Yes, suh. Just so. And that's what made me suppose—”

Mr. Felsburg raised a fat, short hand upon which the biggest, whitest diamond in Red Gravel County glittered.

“You should not talk with me as an officer of that bank—if you will be so good, please,” he stated. “You should talk with me now as an individual.”

“An individual? I'm afraid I don't understand you, suh.”

“Pretty soon you will, Mr. Albritton. This is an individual matter—just between you and me; because I, and not the bank, am the party what holds these here mortgages on your place.”

“You hold 'em?”

“Sure! I bought both those mortgages off the bank quite some time ago. I own those mortgages—and not anybody else whatsoever.”

“But I thought—”

“You don't need to think. You need only that you should listen at what I am telling you now. It is me—Herman Felsburg, Esquire, of the Oak Hall Clothing Emporium—to which you owe this money, principal and likewise interest. So we will talk together, man to man, if you please, Mr. Albritton. Do I make myself plain? I do.”

The debtor dropped to his side the hand with which he had been rubbing a perplexed forehead. A little gleam, as of hope reawakening, came into his eyes.

“Well, suh,” he said, “you sort of take me by surprise—I didn't have any idea that was the state of the case at all. Then, all along, the bank has just been representing you in the matter?”

“As my agent—yes,” said the little merchant. “Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its rules, I reckin, and has to live up to 'em. But, dealing with you, suh, as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I'm hoping so, Mr. Felsburg.”

“How you make that out?”

Mr. Felsburg's tone was so sharply staccato that Albritton's face fell a little.

“Well, suh, I'm hoping that maybe you can see your way clear not to foreclose on me just yet a while. I'd hate mightily to lose my home—I would so! I was born there, Mr. Felsburg. And I've got a sickly wife and a whole houseful of children. I don't know where I'd turn to get another roof over their heads if I was driven off my place. I know I owe you the money and by law you're entitled to it; but I certainly would appreciate the favour if you'd give me a little more time.”

“So? And was there any other little favour you'd like to ask from me, Mr. Albritton?” inquired Mr. Felsburg with impressive politeness.

Perhaps the other missed the note in the speaker's voice; or perhaps he was merely desperate. A drowning man does not pick and choose the straws at which he grasps.

“Yes, suh; since you bring up the subject yourself, there is something else, Mr. Felsburg. If you can see your way clear to giving me a little time, and, on top of that, if you could loan me, say, four hundred dollars more to help carry me over until fall, I believe I can pay you back everything and start clean and clear again.”

“So-o-o!”

Mr. Felsburg turned himself in his chair, showing his back to his visitor, and, taking up a pen, bent over his desk and for a minute wrote briskly, as though to record notes of the proposition. Then he swung back again, facing Albritton.

“Let me see if I get you right, Mr. Albritton,” he said, speaking slowly and prolonging the suspense. “Already you owe me money; and now, instead of paying up what you owe, you should like to borrow yet some more money, eh? What security should you expect to give, Mr. Albritton?”

“Only my word and my promise, Mr. Felsburg,” pleaded Albritton. “You don't know me very well; but if you'll inquire round you'll find out I've got the name for being an honest man, even if I have had a power of hard luck these last few years. I ain't a drinking man, Mr. Felsburg, and I'm a hard worker. If there was somebody I knew better than I know you I'd go to him; but there ain't anybody. I'm right at the end of my rope—I ain't got anywhere to turn.

“I'm confident, if you'll give me a little help, Mr. Felsburg, I can make out to get a new start. But if I'm put off my place now I'll lose the crop I've put in—lose all my time and my labour too. It looks like tobacco is going to fetch a better price this fall than it's fetched for three or four years back, and the young plants I've put in are coming up mighty promising. But I need money to carry me over until I can get my tobacco cured and marketed. Don't you see how it is with me, Mr. Felsburg? Just a little temporary accommodation from you and I'm certain—”

“Business is business, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, cutting in on him. “And all my life I have been a business man. Is it good business, I should like to ask you, that I should loan you yet more money when already you owe me money which you cannot pay? Huh, Mr. Albritton?”

“Maybe it ain't good business; but, just as one human being to another—”

“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then, as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps re-member something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and sixty—the year before the war broke out?”

“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got married too. I wasn't but just twenty-two years old then. But I don't get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What's the year eighteen-sixty got to do with you and me?”

“I'm coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight now, his eyes ashine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that year, Mr. Albritton?”

“I can't say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.

“Then, if you'll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now you listen to me!

“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he came through that gate.

“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you; and you yelled to him that he should get out—that you did not want to buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from him—just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.

“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming. And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs came—big, mean dogs—out from under your house.

“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting hurt him very much, and he cried out.

“But you stood there on your porch; and you clapped your two hands together and you laughed to hear that poor little pedlar boy cry out. And your dogs chased him away down the lane, and they bit him still more in his legs. Maybe perhaps you thought a poor Jew would not have feelings the same as you? Maybe perhaps you thought he would not bleed when those sharp teeth bit him in his legs? So you clapped your hands and you laughed to see him run and to hear him yell out that way. Do you remember all that, Mr. Albritton?”

He stood up now, shaking all over; and his eyes glittered to match the diamond on his quivering hand. They glittered like two little hard bright stones.

Under the tan the face of the man at whom he glared turned a dull brick-dust red. Albritton put up a hand to one burning cheek; and as he made answer the words came from him haltingly, self-accusingly:

“I don't remember it, Mr. Felsburg; but if you say it's true—why, I reckin it must 'a' happened just the way you tell it. It was a low-down, cruel, mean thing to do; and if it was me I'm sorry for it—even now, after all these years. I wasn't much more than a boy, though; and—”

“You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you forgot about it, didn't you?

“I didn't forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have now the red marks from your dogs' teeth. And so now you come here and you stand here before me”—he raised his chubby clenched fists and shook them—“and you—you—you—ask me that I should do you favours!”

“Mr. Felsburg,” said Albritton—and his figure drooped as though he would prostrate himself before the triumphant little man—“I ain't saying this because I hope to get any help from you in a money way—I know there's no chance of that now—I'm saying it because I mean it from the bottom of my soul. I'm sorry. If I thought you'd believe me I'd be willing to go down on my knees and take my Bible oath that I'm sorry.”

“You should save yourself the trouble, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, calmer now. “In the part of your Bible which I believe in it says 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,' Mr. Albritton.”

“All right!” said Albritton. “You've had your say—you're even with me.”

He turned from the gloating figure of the other and started to go. From the chair in which he had reseated himself, Felsburg, a pic-ture of vengeance gratified and sated, watched him, saying nothing until the bankrupt had descended the first step of the stairs and the second. Then he spoke.

“You wait!” he ordered in the tone of a master. “I am not yet done.”

“What's the use?” said Albritton; but he faced about, humbled and crushed. “There ain't anything you could say or do that would make me feel any worse.”

“Come back!” bade Felsburg; and, like a man whipped, the other came back to the doorway.

“You're even with me, I tell you,” he said from the threshold. “What's the use of piling it on?”

Mr. Felsburg did not answer in words. He reached behind him to his desk, wadded up something in his fingers, and, once more rising, he advanced, with his figure distended, on Albritton. Albritton flinched, then straightened himself.

“Hit me if you want to,” he said brokenly. “I won't hit back if you do. I deserve it.”

“Yes, I will hit you,” said Felsburg. “With this I will hit you.”

Into Albritton's right hand he thrust a crumpled slip of paper. At the wadded paper Albritton stared numbly.

“I don't know what you are driving at,” he said; “but, if this is a notice of foreclosure, I don't need any notice.”

“Look at it—close,” bade Felsburg.

And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white and then to red again.

“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four hundred dollars. I loan it to you—without security; and to-day I fix up those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you—more and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”

He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:

“I ask you again—please go away!”

When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.

“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what made him give that man the money?”

The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.

“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin mebbe when you're a little older the answer'll come to you.”

And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.