Chapter VIII. Squire Davenport's Financial Operation - Page 2

without anyone being the wiser.

It is only fair to say that Squire Davenport's face flushed with shame as the unworthy thought came to him, but still he did not banish it. He thought the matter over, and the more he thought the more unwilling he was to give up this sum, which all at once had become dearer to him than all the rest of his possessions.

"I'll wait to see whether the note is found," he said to himself. "Of course, if it is, I will pay it--" That is, he would pay it if he were obliged to do it.

Poor Barclay was buried in Chicago--it would have been too expensive to bring on the body--and pretty soon it transpired that he had left no property, except the modest cottage in which his widow and son continued to live.

Poor Mrs. Barclay! Everybody pitied her, and lamented her straitened circumstances. Squire Davenport kept silence, and thought, with guilty joy, "They haven't found the note; I can keep the money, and no one will be the wiser!"

How a rich man could have been guilty of such consummate meaness I will not undertake to explain, but "the love of money is the root of evil," and Squire Davenport had love of money in no common measure.

Five years passed. Mrs. Barclay was obliged to mortgage her house to obtain the means of living, and the very man who supplied her with the money was the very man whom her husband had blindly trusted. She little dreamed that it was her own money he was doling out to her.

In fact, Squire Davenport himself had almost forgotten it. He had come to consider the thousand dollars and interest fully and absolutely his own, and had no apprehension that his mean fraud would ever be discovered. Like a thunderbolt, then, came to him the declaration of his unsavory visitor that the note was in existence, and was in the hands of a man who meant to use it. Smitten with sudden panic, he stared in the face of the tramp. But he was not going to give up without a struggle.

"You are evidently trying to impose upon me," he said, mentally bracing up. "You wish to extort money from me."

"So I do," said the tramp quietly.

"Ha! you admit it?" exclaimed the squire.

"Certainly; I wouldn't have taken the trouble to come here at great expense and inconvenience if I hadn't been expecting to make some money."

"Then you have come to the wrong person; I repeat it, you've come to the wrong person!" said the squire, straightening his back and eying his companion sternly.

"I begin to think I have," assented the visitor.

"Ha! he weakens!" thought Squire Davenport. "My good man, I recommend you to turn over a new leaf, and seek to earn an honest living, instead of trying to levy blackmail on men of means."

"An honest living!" repeated the