The Plunderer | Page 2

to get out."
"Why? Why have you got to get out?"
Roger Payne shook a hard brown fist at the gray-stone walls of the other side of the clanging street.
"That's why, Jim. It's a prison--to me. Easy enough if you fit in it. I don't. So I'm going to get out; and it's got to be now."
"But why, in the name of Sam, now? You're getting old, I'll admit. Let's see, how long ago is it since I gave you that scarfpin for your twenty-seventh birthday? Twenty-seven! Come out of it, Rog. Fifty-seven is the proper age to begin dreaming about quitting business."
"I know it. That's why I'm going to do it now, before the game gets me. It gets everybody who stays in it. It would even get me. Then at fifty-seven, as you say, I might quit and go outdoors and begin to live--too late. Jim, did you ever see a more pitiful spectacle than a natural-born outdoor man who's kept his nose on a desk for thirty years and then realized his lifelong dream? Neither have I. He thinks he's going to get out and start living then, but what he does is to begin to die--from the shoulders up. No, sir!" The young man sprang to his feet, flinging the swivel chair away with a kick. "I'm not going to be trapped. I'd rather hike back to-morrow to that irrigation job out West and boss Hunkies for Higgins than sit cooped up here day after day and get rich."
"You--crazy young fool!" said Tibbetts affectionately.
"All right, Jim. Crazy, if you please. But that is what's going to happen; you're going to buy me out, or get another partner, and I"--he filled his great lungs with air--"I'm going to get outdoors."
"What're you going to do? I'll bet you don't know. Have you got any plans?"
"Yes, I'm going to get out of the city the day after I wind things up here."
"Where you going?"
"Back home to Jordan City and look the old town over, first of all."
"Jordan City! Why--why you aren't a retired farmer."
Payne laughed. "Not going to settle there, Jim."
"Oh, and after you've looked it over, what then?"
"I'll make my plans there. I don't know what it will be. But whatever it is, it will be something that won't bring me back to town."
James Tibbetts looked long and hopefully at the browned face of his young partner; but at what he saw there his hopes vanished.
"You're set on this, I see, Rog," he said sorrowfully.
"Cheer up, Jim!" responded Payne.
"I'll give you a deal that will help you get rich a lot quicker than if I stayed with you."
Tibbetts shook his head and was silent a long time. "Well, if you're bound to sell, you won't go out of here exactly busted--after two years with me," he said at last. "Rog! Do you mean it? We're going to part?"
"It would be plain hell for me to stick, Jim."
Tibbetts grasped the extended hard brown hand in his own soft white fingers. After a while he managed to stammer:
"I see. This just had to come!"

II
On the fat rolling lands about Jordan City pedigreed kine graze by the hundreds, corn grows high and thick and silos are to be seen in every barnyard. And in Jordan City bank accounts are large and permanent.
It is an old town, as age goes in the Mississippi Valley. Maple trees with huge, solid trunks and immense branches line its older streets. The streets themselves, save for the strip of asphalt where the state highway sweeps through the town, are largely paved with hard red bricks. In the older streets in the residence sections the sidewalks are of the same material, and in many places soft green moss grows undisturbed upon these hard red paths. Back from the little-used sidewalks of these sections, surrounded by hedges of Osage orange or box elder, stand old staid houses in good paint and repair. Rich retired owners of the fat acres of Jordan County live in most of them and own ponderous eight-cylinder cars.
There is a new section of the town, too, where the architecture runs to bungalow styles, where the installment collectors from the phonograph houses are regularly seen, and where papa gets out in front and twirls the crank when the family car goes out for its airing. No important line of demarcation separates the old staid section of town from the new and brighter one. Major Trimble, President of the Jordan Bank & Trust Company, accepts deposits from both sections with strict impartiality; the spire of the Methodist Episcopal Church is the Sunday lodestone to folk on both sides of town, as well as for much of the country round. They talk mainly of farms, of cattle and of the weather on the streets of Jordan; and the young