reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to
the crown of his head was like a baldness made up for the stage. What
his face expressed chiefly was a bland and beneficent caution. Here,
you must have said to yourself, is a man of just, sober, and prudent
views, fixed purposes, and the good citizenship that avoids debt and
hazard of every kind.

"What do you want?" asked Lapham, wheeling round in his swivel-chair as
Rogers entered his room, and pushing the door shut with his foot,
without rising.

Rogers took the chair that was not offered him, and sat with his
hat-brim on his knees, and its crown pointed towards Lapham. "I want
to know what you are going to do," he answered with sufficient
self-possession.

"I'll tell you, first, what I've done," said Lapham. "I've been to
Dubuque, and I've found out all about that milling property you turned
in on me. Did you know that the G. L. & P. had leased the P. Y. & X.?"

"I some suspected that it might."

"Did you know it when you turned the property in on me? Did you know
that the G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills?"

"I presumed the road would give a fair price for them," said Rogers,
winking his eyes in outward expression of inwardly blinking the point.

"You lie," said Lapham, as quietly as if correcting him in a slight
error; and Rogers took the word with equal sang froid. "You knew the
road wouldn't give a fair price for the mills. You knew it would give
what it chose, and that I couldn't help myself, when you let me take
them. You're a thief, Milton K. Rogers, and you stole money I lent
you." Rogers sat listening, as if respectfully considering the
statements. "You knew how I felt about that old matter--or my wife
did; and that I wanted to make it up to you, if you felt anyway badly
used. And you took advantage of it. You've got money out of me, in
the first place, on securities that wa'n't worth thirty-five cents on
the dollar, and you've let me in for this thing, and that thing, and
you've bled me every time. And all I've got to show for it is a
milling property on a line of road that can squeeze me, whenever it
wants to, as dry as it pleases. And you want to know what I'm going to
do? I'm going to squeeze YOU. I'm going to sell these collaterals of
yours,"--he touched a bundle of papers among others that littered his
desk,--"and I'm going to let the mills go for what they'll fetch. I
ain't going to fight the G. L. & P.