Part 22

The rumbling ceased and in due time one Lester Botts, a farmer, not so much better in appearance than Queeder, arrived at the door. The prospector explained what was wanted and the agreement was eventually completed, only Botts, not knowing of the mineral which Queeder’s acres represented, was anxious to tell the prospector of better land than this, from an agricultural view, which could be had for less money, but he did not know how to go about it. Before she would sign, Mrs. Queeder made it perfectly clear where she stood in the matter.

“I git my sheer uv this hyur money now, don’t I,” she demanded, “paid tuh me right hyur?”

Crawford, uncertain as to Queeder’s wishes in this, looked at him; and he, knowing his wife’s temper and being moved by greed, exclaimed, “Yuh don’t git nuthin’ ’ceptin’ I die. Yuh ain’t entitled tuh no sheer unless’n we’re separatin’, which we hain’t.”

“Then I don’t sign nuthin’,” said Mrs. Queeder truculently.

“Of course I don’t want to interfere,” commented the prospector, soothingly, “but I should think you’d rather give her her share of this—thirty-three dollars,” he eyed Queeder persuasively—“and then possibly a third of the two thousand—that’s only six hundred and sixty—rather than stop the sale now, wouldn’t you? You’ll have to agree to do something like that. It’s a good bargain. There ought to be plenty for everybody.”

The farmer hearkened to the subtlety of this. After all, six hundred and sixty out of eight thousand was not so much. Rather than risk delay and discovery he pretended to soften, and finally consented. The marks were made and their validity attested by Botts, the one hundred in cash being counted out in two piles, according to Mrs. Queeder’s wish, and the agreement pocketed. Then the prospector accompanied by Mr. Botts, was off—only Queeder, following and delaying him, was finally handed over in secret the difference between the hundred and the sum originally agreed upon. When he saw all the money the old farmer’s eyes wiggled as if magnetically operated. Trembling with the agony of greed he waited, and then his hard and knotted fingers closed upon the bills like the claws of a gripping hawk.

“Thank yuh,” he said aloud. “Thank yuh,” and he jerked doorward in distress. “See me alone fust when yuh come ag’in. We gotta be mighty keerful er she’ll find out, an’ ef she does she’ll not sign nuthin’, an’ raise ol’ Harry, too.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” replied the prospector archly. He was thinking how easy it would be, in view of all the dishonesty and chicanery already practised, to insist that the two thousand written in in pencil was the actual sale price and efface old Queeder by threatening to expose his duplicity. However, there were sixty days yet in which to consider this. “In sixty days, maybe less, I’ll show up.” And he slipped gracefully away, leaving the old earth-scraper to brood alone.

But all was not ended with the payment of this sum, as any one might have foretold. For Dode and Jane, hearing after a little while from their mother of the profitable sale of the land, were intensely moved. Money—any money, however small in amount—conjured up visions of pleasure and ease, and who was to get it, after all the toil here on the part of all? Where was their share in all this? They had worked, too. They demanded it in repeated ways, but to no avail. Their mother and father were obdurate, insisting that they wait until the sale was completed before any further consideration was given the matter.

While they were thus arguing, however, quarreling over even so small a sum as $100, as they thought, a new complication was added by Dode learning, as he soon did, that this was all mineral land, that farms were being sold in Adair—the next township—and even here; that it was rumored that Queeder had already sold his land for $5,000, and that if he had he had been beaten, for the land was worth much more—$200 an acre even, or $14,000. At once he suspected his father and mother of some treachery in connection with the sale—that there had been no option given, but a genuine sale made, and that Queeder or his mother, or both, were concealing a vast sum from himself and Jane. An atmosphere of intense suspicion and evil will was at once introduced.

“They’ve sold the furm fer $5,000 ’stid uv $2,000; that’s whut they’ve gone an’ done,” insisted Dode one day to Jane in the presence of his father and mother. “Ev’rybody aroun’ hyur knows now what this hyur land’s wuth, an’ that’s whut they got, yuh kin bet.”

“Yuh lie!” shrieked Queeder shrilly, who was at once struck by the fact that if what Dode said was true he had walked into a financial as well as a moral trap from which he could not well extricate himself. “I hain’t sold nuthin’,” he went on angrily. “Lester Botts wuz hyur an’ seed whut we done. He signed onto it.”

“Ef the land’s wuth more’n $2,000, that feller ’twuz hyur didn’ agree tuh pay no more’n that fer it in hyur,” put in Mrs. Queeder explanatorily, although, so little did she trust her husband, she was now beginning to wonder if there might not have been some secret agreement between him and this stranger. “Ef he had any different talk with yer Paw,” and here she eyed old Queeder suspiciously, beginning to recall the prospector’s smooth airs and ways, “he didn’ say nuthin’ ’bout it tuh me. I do rec’leck yer Paw’n him talkin’ over by the fence yander near an hour afore they come in hyur. I wondered then whut it wuz about.” She was beginning to worry as to how she was to get more seeing that the price agreed upon was now, apparently, inconsequential.

And as for Dode, he now eyed his father cynically and suspiciously. “I cal’late he got somepin more fer it than he’s tellin’ us about,” he insisted. “They ain’t sellin’ land down to Arno right now fer no $200 an acre an’ him not knowin’ it—an’ land not ez good ez this, nuther. Ye’re hidin’ the money whut yuh got fer it, that’s whut!”

Mrs. Queeder, while greatly disturbed as to the possibility of duplicity on her husband’s part in connection with all this, still considered it policy to call Heaven to witness that in her case at least no duplicity was involved. If more had been offered or paid she knew nothing of it. For his part Queeder boiled with fear, rage, general opposition to all of them and their share in this.

“Yuh consarned varmint!” he squealed, addressing Dode and leaping to his feet and running for a stick of stovewood, “I’ll show yuh whuther we air er not! Yuh ’low I steal, do yuh?”

Dode intercepted him, however, and being the stronger, pushed him off. It was always so easy so to do—much to Queeder’s rage. He despised his son for his triumphant strength alone, to say nothing of his dour cynicism in regard to himself. The argument was ended by the father being put out of the house and the mother pleading volubly that in so far as she knew it was all as she said, that in signing the secret agreement with her husband she had meant no harm to her children, but only to protect them and herself.

But now, brooding over the possibility of Queeder’s deception, she began to lay plans for his discomfiture in any way that she might—she and Dode and Jane. Queeder himself raged secretly between fear and hatred of Dode and what might follow because of his present knowledge. How was he to prevent Dode from being present at the final transaction, and if so how would the secret difference be handed him? Besides, if he took the sum mentioned, how did he know that he was not now being overreached? Every day nearly brought new rumors of new sales at better prices than he had been able to fix. In addition, each day Mrs. Queeder cackled like an irritable hen over the possible duplicity of her husband, although that creature in his secretive greed and queerness was not to be encompassed. He fought shy of the house the greater part of each day, jerked like a rat at every sound or passing stranger and denied himself words to speak or explain, or passed the lie if they pressed him too warmly. The seven hundred extra he had received was wrapped in paper and hidden in a crevice back of a post in the barn, a tin can serving as an outer protection for his newly acquired wealth. More than once during the day he returned to that spot, listened and peeked before he ventured to see whether it was still safe.

Indeed, there was something deadly in the household order from now on, little short of madness in fact, for now mother and children schemed for his downfall while all night long old Queeder wakened, jerking in the blackness and listening for any sounds which might be about the barn. On more than one occasion he changed the hiding place, even going so far as to keep the money on his person for a time. Once he found an old rusty butcher knife and, putting that in his shirt bosom, he slept with it and dreamed of trouble.

Into the heart of this walked another prospector one morning rejoicing, like the first one, at his find. Like all good business men he was concerned to see the owner only and demanded that Queeder be called.

“Oh, Paw!” called Jane from the rickety doorway. “Thar’s some one hyur wants tuh see yuh!”

Old Queeder looked warily up from his hot field, where he had been waiting these many days, and beheld the stranger. He dropped his weed fighting and came forward. Dode drifted in from somewhere.

“Pretty dry weather we’re having, isn’t it?” remarked the stranger pleasantly meeting him halfway in his approach.

“Yes,” he replied vacantly, for he was very, very much worn these days, mentally and physically. “It’s tol’able dry! Tol-able dry!” He wiped his leathery brow with his hand.

“You don’t know of any one about here, do you, who has any land for sale?”

“Ye’re another one uv them min’l prowspecters, I projeck, eh?” inquired Queeder, now quite openly. There was no need to attempt to conceal that fact any longer.

The newcomer was taken aback, for he had not expected so much awareness in this region so soon. “I am,” he said frankly.

“I thought so,” said Queeder.

“Have you ever thought of selling the land here?” he inquired.

“Well, I dunno,” began the farmer shrewdly. “Thar’ve been fellers like yuh aroun’ hyar afore now lookin’ at the place. Whut do yuh cal-late it might be wuth tuh yuh?” He eyed him sharply the while they strolled still further away from the spot where Dode, Jane and the mother formed an audience in the doorway.

The prospector ambled about the place examining the surface lumps, so very plentiful everywhere.

“This looks like fairly good land to me,” he said quietly after a time. “You haven’t an idea how much you’d want an acre for it, have you?”

“Well, I hyur they’re gettin’ ez much ez three hundred down to Arno,” replied Queeder, exaggerating fiercely. Now that a second purchaser had appeared he was eager to learn how much more, if any, than the original offer would be made.

“Yes—well, that’s a little steep, don’t you think, considering the distance the metal would have to be hauled to the railroad? It’ll cost considerable to get it over there.”

“Not enough, I ’low, tuh make it wuth much less’n three hundred, would it?” observed Queeder, sagely.

“Well, I don’t know about that. Would you take two hundred an acre for as much as forty acres of it?”

Old Queeder pricked his ears at the sound of bargain. As near as he could figure, two hundred an acre for forty acres would bring him as much as he was now to get for the entire seventy, and he would still have thirty to dispose of. The definiteness of the proposition thrilled him, boded something large for his future—eight thousand for forty, and all he could wring from the first comer had been eight thousand for seventy!

“Huh!” he said, hanging on the argument with ease and leisure. “I got an offer uv a option on the hull uv it fer twelve thousan’ now.”

“What!” said the stranger, surveying him critically. “Have you signed any papers in the matter?”

Queeder looked at him for the moment as if he suspected treachery, and then seeing the gathered family surveying them from the distant doorway he made the newcomer a cabalistic sign.

“Come over hyur,” he said, leading off to a distant fence. At the safe distance they halted. “I tell yuh just how ’tis,” he observed very secretively. “Thar wuz a feller come along hyur three er four weeks ago an’ at that time I didn’t know ez how this hyur now wuz min’l, see? An’ he ast me, ’thout sayin’ nuthin’ ez tuh whut he knowed, whut I’d take for it, acre fer acre. Well, thar wuz anuther feller, a neighbor o’ mine, had been along hyur an’ he wuz sayin’ ez how a piece o’ land just below, about forty acres, wuz sold fer five thousan’ dollars. Seein’ ez how my land wuz the same kind o’ land, only better, I ’lowed ez how thar bein’ seventy acres hyur tuh his forty I oughta git nearly twicet ez much, an’ I said so. He didn’t ’low ez I ought at fust, but later on he kind o’ come roun’ an’ we agreed ez how I bein’ the one that fust had the place—I wuz farmin’ hyur ’fore ever I married my wife—that ef any sale wuz made I orter git the biggest sheer. So we kind o’ fixed it up b’tween us, quiet-like an’ not lettin’ anybody else know, that when it come tuh makin’ out the papers an’ sich at the end uv the sixty days he was to gimme a shade the best o’ the money afore we signed any papers. Course I wouldn’t do nuthin’ like that ef the place hadn’t b’longed tuh me in the fust place, an’ ef me an’ my wife an’ chil’n got along ez well’s we did at fust, but she’s allers a-fightin’ an’ squallin’. Ef he come back hyur, ez he ’lowed he would, I wuz t’ have eight thousan’ fer myself, an’ me an’ my wife wuzta divide the rest b’tween us ez best we could, her to have her third, ez the law is.”

The stranger listened with mingled astonishment, amusement and satisfaction at the thought that the contract, if not exactly illegal, could at least to Queeder be made to appear so. For an appeal to the wife must break it, and besides because of the old man’s cupidity he might easily be made to annul the original agreement. For plainly even now this farmer did not know the full value of all that he had so foolishly bartered away. About him were fields literally solid with zinc under the surface. Commercially $60,000 would be a mere bagatelle to give for it, when the East was considered. One million dollars would be a ridiculously low capitalization for a mine based on this property. A hundred thousand might well be his share for his part in the transaction. Good heavens, the other fellow had bought a fortune for a song! It was only fair to try to get it away from him.

“I’ll tell you how this is, Mr. Queeder,” he said after a time. “It looks to me as though this fellow, whoever he is, has given you a little the worst end of this bargain. Your land is worth much more than that, that’s plain enough. But you can get out of that easily enough on the ground that you really didn’t know what you were selling at the time you made this bargain. That’s the law, I believe. You don’t have to stick by an agreement if it’s made when you don’t understand what you’re doing. As a matter of fact, I think I could get you out of it if you wanted me to. All you would have to do would be to refuse to sign any other papers when the time comes and return the money that’s been paid you. Then when the time came I would be glad to take over your whole farm at three hundred dollars an acre and pay cash down. That would make you a rich man. I’d give you three thousand cash in hand the day you signed an agreement to sell. The trouble is you were just taken in. You and your wife really didn’t know what you were doing.”

“That’s right,” squeaked Queeder, “we wuz. We didn’t ’low ez they wuz any min’l on this when we signed that air contrack.”

Three hundred dollars an acre, as he dumbly figured it out, meant $21,000—twenty-one instead of a wretched eight thousand! For the moment he stood there quite lost as to what to do, say, think, a wavering, element-worn figure. His bent and shriveled body, raked and gutted by misfortune, fairly quivered with the knowledge that riches were really his for the asking, yet also that now, owing to his early error and ignorance in regard to all this, he might not be able to arrange for their reception. His seared and tangled brain, half twisted by solitude, balanced unevenly with the weight of this marvelous possibility. It crossed the wires of his mind and made him see strabismically.

The prospector, uncertain as to what his silence indicated, added: “I might even do a little better than that, Mr. Queeder—say, twenty-five thousand. You could have a house in the city for that. Your wife could wear silk dresses; you yourself need never do another stroke of work; your son and daughter could go to college if they wanted to. All you have to do is to refuse to sign that deed when he comes back—hand him the money or get his address and let me send it to him.”

“He swindled me, so he did!” Queeder almost shouted now, great beads of sweat standing out upon his brow. “He tried tuh rob me! He shan’t have an acre, by God—not an acre!”

“That’s right,” said the newcomer, and before he left he again insinuated into the farmer’s mind the tremendous and unfair disproportion between twelve (as he understood Queeder was receiving) and twenty-five thousand. He pictured the difference in terms of city or town opportunities, the ease of his future life.

Unfortunately, the farmer possessed no avenue by which to escape from his recent duplicity. Having deceived his wife and children over so comparatively small a sum as eight thousand, this immensely greater sum offered many more difficulties—bickering, quarreling, open fighting, perhaps, so fierce were Dode and his wife in their moods, before it could be attained. And was he equal to it? At the same time, although he had never had anything, he was now feeling as though he had lost a great deal, as if some one were endeavoring to take something immense away from him, something which he had always had!

During the days that followed he brooded over this, avoiding his family as much as possible, while they, wondering when the first prospector would return and what conversation or arrangement Queeder had had with the second, watched him closely. At last he was all but unbalanced mentally, and by degrees his mind came to possess but one idea, and that was that his wife, his children, the world, all were trying to rob him, and that his one escape lay in flight with his treasure if only he could once gain possession of it. But how? How? One thing was sure. They should not have it. He would fight first; he would die. And alone in his silent field, with ragged body and mind, he brooded over riches and felt as if he already had them to defend.

In the meanwhile the first prospector had been meditating as to the ease, under the circumstances, with which Queeder’s land could be taken from him at the very nominal price of two thousand, considering the secrecy which, according to Queeder’s own wish, must attach to the transfer of all moneys over that sum. Once the deed was signed—the same reading for two thousand—in the presence of the wife and a lawyer who should accompany him, how easy to walk off and pay no more, standing calmly on the letter of the contract!

It was nearing that last day now and the terrible suspense was telling. Queeder was in no mental state to endure anything. His hollow eyes showed the wondering out of which nothing had come. His nervous strolling here and there had lost all semblance of reason. Then on the last of the sixty allotted days there rode forward the now bane of his existence, the original prospector, accompanied by Attorney Giles, of Arno, a veritable scamp and rascal of a lawyer.

At first on seeing them Queeder felt a strong impulse to run away, but on second consideration he feared so to do. The land was his. If he did not stay Dode and Mrs. Queeder might enter on some arrangement without his consent—something which would leave him landless, money-less—or they might find out something about the extra money he had taken and contracted for, the better price he was now privately to receive. It was essential that he stay, and yet he had no least idea as to how he would solve it all.

Jane, who was in the doorway as they entered the yard, was the one to welcome them, although Dode, watchful and working in a nearby patch, saluted them next. Then Mrs. Queeder examined them cynically and with much opposition. These, then, were the twain who were expecting to misuse her financially!

“Where’s your father, Dode?” asked Attorney Giles familiarly, for he knew them well.

“Over thar in the second ’tater patch,” answered Dode sourly. A moment later he added with rough calculation, “Ef ye’re comin’ about the land, though, I ’low ez ’twon’t do yuh no good. Maw an’ Paw have decided not tuh sell. The place is wuth a heap more’n whut you all’re offerin’. They’re sellin’ land roun’ Arno with not near ez much min’l onto hit ez this hez for three hundred now, an’ yuh all only wanta give two thousan’ fer the hull place, I hyur. Maw’n Paw’d be fools ef they’d agree tuh that.”

“Oh, come now,” exclaimed Giles placatively and yet irritably—a very wasp who was always attempting to smooth over the ruffled tempers of people on just such trying occasions as this. “Mr. Crawford here has an option on this property signed by your mother and father and witnessed by a Mr.”—he considered the slip—“a Mr. Botts—oh, yes, Lester Botts. You cannot legally escape that. All Mr. Crawford has to do is to offer you the money—leave it here, in fact—and the property is his. That is the law. An option is an option, and this one has a witness. I don’t see how you can hope to escape it, really.”

“They wuzn’t nuthin’ said about no min’l when I signed that air,” insisted Mrs. Queeder, “an’ I don’t ’low ez no paper whut I didn’t know the meanin’ uv is goin’ tuh be good anywhar. Leastways, I won’t put my name onto nuthin’ else.”

“Well, well!” said Mr. Giles fussily, “We’d better get Mr. Queeder in here and see what he says to this. I’m sure he’ll not take any such unreasonable and illegal view.”

In the meantime old Queeder, called for lustily by Jane, came edging around the house corner like some hunted animal—dark, fearful, suspicious—and at sight of him the prospector and lawyer, who had seated themselves, arose.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Queeder,” said the prospector, but stopped, astonished at the weird manner in which Queeder passed an aimless hand over his brow and gazed almost dully before him. He had more the appearance of a hungry bird than a human being. He was yellow, emaciated, all but wild.

“Look at Paw!” whispered Jane to Dode, used as she was to all the old man’s idiosyncrasies.

“Yes, Mr. Queeder,” began the lawyer, undisturbed by the whisper of Jane and anxious to smooth over a very troublesome situation, “here we are. We have come to settle this sale with you according to the terms of the option. I suppose you’re ready?”

“Whut?” asked old Queeder aimlessly, then, recovering himself slightly, began, “I hain’t goin’ tuh sign nuthin’! Nuthin’ ’tall! That’s whut I hain’t! Nuthin’!” He opened and closed his fingers and twisted and craned his neck as though physically there were something very much awry with him.