I always pay my lawful debts, when they're properly
demanded. If this note had been presented yesterday, I'd have paid it.
To-day it's too late. It ain't a lawful debt."

"Do you really mean to say, Mr. Fetters, that you have deliberately
robbed those poor women of this money all these years, and are not
ashamed of it, not even when you're found out, and that you are going
to take refuge behind the statute?"

"Now, see here, Mr. Caxton," returned Fetters, without apparent
emotion, "you want to be careful about the language you use. I might
sue you for slander. You're a young man, that hopes to have a future
and live in this county, where I expect to live and have law business
done long after some of your present clients have moved away. I didn't
owe the estate of John Treadwell one cent--you ought to be lawyer
enough to know that. He owed me money, and paid me with a note. I
collected the note. I owed him money and paid it with a note. Whoever
heard of anybody's paying a note that wasn't presented?"

"It's a poor argument, Mr. Fetters. You would have let those ladies
starve to death before you would have come forward and paid that
debt."

"They've never asked me for charity, so I wasn't called on to offer
it. And you know now, don't you, that if I'd paid the amount of that
note, and then it had turned up afterward in somebody else's hands,
I'd have had to pay it over again; now wouldn't I?"

Caxton could not deny it. Fetters had robbed the Treadwell estate, but
his argument was unanswerable.

"Yes," said Caxton, "I suppose you would."

"I'm sorry for the women," said Fetters, "and I've stood ready to pay
that note all these years, and it ain't my fault that it hasn't been
presented. Now it's outlawed, and you couldn't expect a man to just
give away that much money. It ain't a lawful debt, and the law's good
enough for me."

"You're awfully sorry for the ladies, aren't you?" said Caxton, with
thinly veiled sarcasm.

"I surely am; I'm honestly sorry for them."

"And you'd pay the note if you had to, wouldn't you?" asked Caxton.

"I surely would. As I say, I always pay my legal debts."

"All right," said Caxton triumphantly, "then you'll pay this. I filed
suit against you yesterday, which takes the case out of the statute."

Fetters concealed his discomfiture.

"Well," he said, with quiet malignity, "I've nothing more to say till
I consult my lawyer. But I want to tell you one thing. You are ruining
a fi