"I'm not aiming at anything," Gordon answered,
"I'm just doing."

"And there's that Hagan that got five thousand
from you, it's an open fact about him. He came
from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk,
to get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment,
of a kin in Greenstream and left for parts
unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn't love a fool."

"I may be a fool as you see me," Gordon contended
stubbornly; "and the few liars that get my
money may laugh. But there's this, there's this,
Simmons -- I'm not cursed by the dispossessed and
the ailing and the plumb penniless. I don't go to a
man with his crop a failure on the field like, well
-- we'll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand
for his breath. I've put a good few out of -- of
Cannon's reach. Did you forget that I know how
it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps,
call out my place for debt? Did you forget that
I sat in this office while you talked of old Presbyterian
friends and sold me into the street?"

"Incorrigible," Valentine Simmons said, "incorrigible;
no sense of responsibility. I had hoped
Pompey's estate would bring some out in you. But
I should have known -- it's the Makimmon blood;
you are the son of your father. I knew your grandfather
too, a man that fairly insulted opportunity."

"We've never been storekeepers."

[[321]]

p320 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p321w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p322

v?