Satan's Bushel by Garet Garrett Page A

him before, always in that place on the bench, remote and unseeing. You could imagine that without power, authority or grandeur of any sort he lived there among his progeny, begotten of himself and a strong woman, and derived his dignity from the one phenomenon of venerable silence; also that he took a great deal of ironic pleasure in it.
    “I don’t suppose you knew Absalom Weaver?” said Dreadwind, more out of curiosity to see how he would react when directly provoked than with any sort of expectation.
    The patriarchal deposit did not stir. One could not believe that anything within it stirred. Dreadwind stood looking down at it for a minute, then turned away and had one foot on the running board of his car when a far-away voice at the pitch of an unoiled hinge arrested him. The bearded figure had uttered words. Dreadwind asked him what they were. After a long time he repeated them.
    “Ye can suppose it,” he said.
    “Well, do you?” Dreadwind asked.
    “Better nor he knew himself,” was the answer when at length it came.
    Dreadwind sat down on the grass, facing the motionless figure, and gave the impulse plenty of time to augment itself.
    “What made him a vagabond?” he asked.
    “If you ask him why he don’t own any land—if you ask him—do you know what he will say?”
    “What will he say?” asked Dreadwind.
    “He will say he ain’t fit to own land. And he ain’t fit.”
    “Why will he say that?” asked Dreadwind.
    “I told him. I told him he were not fit to own land. And he ain’t the one to forget it.”
    It was an afternoon’s work, requiring much subtlety and patience, to mine that dry cavern of its treasure. Each fragment was parted with reluctantly. And it was a plain story, deserving to be briefly told.

CHAPTER VI
    W EAVER, as one might have guessed, was once a farmer on his own land. He was a good farmer. No trouble there. He was industrious and far-seeing. No trouble yet. But he had a gambling mania. What he gained by farming he lost in the nearest bucket shop. He gambled in wheat. Never anything else. This went on for years. The mania grew. His betting losses in that phantom wheat on the blackboard began to be more than all the profit he could win from the soil; and the farm itself became involved in debt. Each time a new mortgage was necessary to pay up his losses and avoid a lawsuit the cruelties of the domestic scene were greater. You can see it. A woman in the rôle of martyr, taking advantage of a just grievance to balance off all petty scores, as almost any woman will. Children bewildered at first and then beginning to take sides. A proud and willful man who must storm it through to save his own ego and authority.
    The woman said that he promised each time to stop. Almost for certain he never did. He wasn’t one who would, nor one who, if he had, would have defaulted on his word; and yet, of course, a woman in these circumstances, saying each time she would never sign again, could not be expected clearly to see the difference between an ultimatum and a covenant. She understood he would cease gambling. How could he go on if she meant what she said and would never sign again? But that was an understanding arrived at in her mind alone. Anyone who knows a gambler, one in whom the passion is deep, can imagine what he was thinking. It would not be necessary for her to sign another mortgage. He would beat the phantom wheat game and clear the farm of debt. What ruins the gambler is not ill luck. It is counting on the future to pay for the past.
    The sequel is foreseen. This little effigy of a patriarch with his beard flowing into his bosom like a lost river was at that time an intimate friend of the family—one who understood everything, one in whom the wife confided, one who meddled when he dared and still bore the scars of Weaver’s scorn. He was there this night, hot with the news he had got in town. Weaver at last had lost the farm. There had been a sudden fall in the price of