Florence gazed at him with a hardening face. He evidently meant it as a reminder that she owed him money. The man was becoming intolerable.
"Is it?" she asked indifferently. "In any case, I shall no doubt manage to meet my debts when they fall due."
Nevis had reasons for believing that it would be more difficult than she seemed to anticipate, but he talked about something else, and then, finding that his companion did not favor him with very much attention, he took his leave. When he was getting into his buggy Hunter came up and stopped him.
"I'm rather busy, but I can spare you a few minutes if it's necessary," he said.
Nevis looked at him with a provocative smile.
"It isn't," he answered. "It was your wife I came to see; she entrusted me with the arranging of a little matter."
He gathered up the reins, and added, as though to explain his departure:
"There are several things I want to get through with at the bluff this evening."
Hunter walked up on the veranda and, leaning on the balustrade, looked at his wife.
"You have had a deal of some kind with that man?"
A flush of anger swept into Florence's cheek.
"He told you that?" she exclaimed; and then added, with a harsh laugh, "As it happens, he was quite correct."
Hunter stood still with an expressionless face for a moment or two, apparently waiting in case she had anything else to say; and then, with a gesture which might have meant anything, he moved away along the veranda. Florence's conscience accused her when he disappeared into the house; but she was most clearly sensible that she was now a little afraid of Nevis and disposed to hate him. However, she lay quietly in her basket-chair until word was brought her that supper was ready.
Two or three days later Nevis sat late one night in his office at the railroad settlement. It was situated at the back of his implement store, on the ground floor of a very ugly wooden building which had a false front that rose a little beyond the ridge of roof. One door opened directly on to the prairie; the other led into the store, from which there exuded a pungent smell of paint and varnish. A nickeled lamp hung over Nevis's head, and the little room was unpleasantly hot, so hot, indeed, that he sat in his shirt-sleeves before a table littered with papers. Not far away a small safe stood open. This contained further papers tied up in several bundles and neatly endorsed. There was nothing else in the room except a few shelves filled with account books; and there was no covering on the floor. Nevis, like most commercial men in the small western towns, wasted very little money on superfluous accessories. He found that he could employ it much more profitably.