on conducted his peculiar transactions. He
turned and placed Simmons' acknowledgment, the various papers of the
dissolved partnership, in the safe.

"That finishes all I had in Stenton," he observed.

Valentine Simmons made no immediate reply. He was intent, with
tightly-folded lips, on the cheque in his hand. His shirt, as ever, was
immaculately starched, the blue button was childlike, bland; but it was
cold without, and hot in the room where they sat, and the color on his
cheeks resembled dabs of vermilion on buffers of old white leather; the
tufts of hair above his ears had dwindled to mere cottony scraps.

"Prompt and satisfactory," he said at last. "I tell you, Gordon, you can
see as far as another into a transaction. Promises are of no account but
value received ..." he held up the cheque, a strip of pale orange paper,
pinched between withered fingers.

Suddenly he was in a hurry to get away; he drew his overcoat of
close-haired, brown hide about his narrow shoulders, and trotted to the
door, to his buggy awaiting him at the corner of the porch.

XV

Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his
newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency,
presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He
brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of
the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of
those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the
slightly-varying sums paid--the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For
the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original,
individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.

Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending
them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on
slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing
sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal,
often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, "The piney
trees on Pap's and mine but not Henny's for nineteen years." Another bore,
above the date, "In this year of Jesus Christ's holy redemption."

The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record,
the signatures were all witnessed.

It was a slow, fatiguing process. A number of the original vendors, Gordon
knew, had died, their families were scattered; others