The Debtor | Page 9

not do, in a big undertaking like a mine,
for you to be creepled. No, Arthur, boy, wait until the next year is up. It
is for your good."
In vain Arthur offered an advance upon the original advance price. "No,
Arthur, boy," he repeated.
"No, Arthur, boy," he continued to repeat. "It is not wise for you to be
creepled in your business."
Arthur protested that he would not be crippled, but with no avail. He
went away disappointed, and yet with his faith unshaken. He did not
know what transpired later on, that negotiations which would
materially enhance the value of the property were being carried on with
a railroad by the planter, who was himself one of the railroad directors.
About six months after Arthur's attempt to purchase back his ancestral
acres, and while he was at high tide of a small prosperity, this same
man came to him with a proposal for him to furnish on contract a large
quantity of coal to this same railroad. Arthur jumped at the chance. The
contract was drawn up by a lawyer in the nearest town and signed.
Arthur, trusting blindly to the honesty and good-will of everybody, had
hurried for his train without seeing more than that the stipulated rates
had been properly mentioned in the contract. His wife was ill; in fact,
Charlotte was only a few days old, and he was anxious and eager to be

home. There had been no strikes at that period in that vicinity, and
indeed comparatively few in the whole country. Arthur would almost
as soon have thought of guarding in his contract against an earthquake;
but the strike clause was left out, and there was a strike. In consequence
he was unable to fill the contract without ruin, and he was therefore
ruined. In the end the old friend of his father, who had purchased his
patrimony, remained in undisputed possession of it, with an additional
value of several thousands from the passage of the railroad through one
end of the plantation, and had, besides, the mine. Arthur had sold the
mine at a nominal price to pay his debts, to a third party who
represented this man. He had been left actually penniless with a wife
and two babies to support, but as his pocket became empty his very
soul had seemed to become full to overflowing with the rage and
bitterness of his worldly experience. He had learned that the man whom
he had trusted had instigated the strike; he learned about the railroad
deal. One night he went to his plantation with a shot-gun. He
approached the house which had formerly been his own home, where
the man was living then. He fully intended to shoot him. He had not a
doubt but he should do it, and he had always considered that he should
have carried out his purpose had not an old horse which the man had
purchased with the estate, and which was loose on the lawn, from some
reason or other, whinnied eagerly, and sidled up to him, and thrust her
nose over his shoulder. He had been used, when a boy, to feed her
sugar, and she remembered. Arthur went away through the soft
Southern moonlight without shooting the man. Somehow it was
because of the horse, and he never knew why it was. The old childish
innocence and happiness seemed to flood over him in a light of spirit
which dimmed the moonlight and swept away the will for murder from
his soul. But the bitterness and the hate of the man who had wronged
him never left him. The next day he went North, and the man in
possession breathed more easily, for he had had secret misgivings.
"You had better look out," another man had said to him. "You have
trodden on the toes of a tiger when you have trodden on the toes of a
Carroll. Sooner or later you will have to pay for it."
No one in the little Kentucky village knew what had become of Arthur

Carroll for some time, with the exception of an aunt of Mrs. Carroll's,
who was possessed of some property and who lived there. She knew,
but she told nothing, probably because she had a fierce pride of family.
After years the Carroll girls, Ina and Charlotte, had come back to their
father's birthplace and attended a small school some three miles distant
from the village, a select young ladies' establishment at which their
mother had been educated, and they had visited rather often at their
great-aunt Catherine's. After they had finished school, the great-aunt
had paid the bills, although nobody knew it, not even the elderly sisters
who kept the school, since the aunt lied and stated that Captain Carroll
had