kinds at his. He is terribly anxious, for some reason, to get those hard, lean fingers of his on the property.”
He puffed at his pipe for quite a little while in silence, then spoke again.
“That’s a dangerous kind of man, Billy Wentworth, the most risky kind a community can have. A man who thinks he’s smart and isn’t—that’s about as bad a combination as can be made. Jarreth has a reputation to live up to, for being shrewd and quick and able to get the best of people; he nearly lost that reputation and he will stop at nothing to get it back. He doesn’t mean any harm, he hardly means to be really dishonest; but he’s so bound to prove himself smart that he will let anybody who is more of a rascal than he is, make a fool of him. I’m not easy in my mind when I think of him and of that ‘friend’ of his that he’s so bound to prove is straight. No, I don’t like it.”
And when Billy went home to supper he left the Captain still sitting on the bench, evidently turning his anxious thoughts to the same matter, if one could judge by the way he smoked his pipe in short, troubled puffs.
The days went by, the poppies drooped their
