“One remembered,” said Rand, and watched his wife put the flowers in water.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAW OFFICE

“If you were not so damned particular—­” said the weasel disconsolately.

“I’m not damned particular,” answered Rand.  “I’ve wanted wealth and I’ve wanted power ever since I went barefoot and suckered tobacco—­as you know who know me better than almost any one else!  But this”—­he tapped the papers on the table before him—­“this is cheating.”

“Oh, you!” complained the scamp.  “You are of the elect.  What you want you’ll take by main force.  You are a strong man!  You’ve taken a deal since that day we went into the bookshop by the bridge.  But I’m no Samson or David—­I’m just Tom Mocket—­and still, why shouldn’t I have my pennyworth?”

Rand paused in his walking up and down the office in Main Street.  It was the late winter, a year and more from that evening when he and Jacqueline had first come to the house on Shockoe Hill.  Standing by the rough deal table, he laid an authoritative hand upon the documents with which it was strewn.  “You’ll never get your pennyworth here.  The scheme these gentry have afoot is just a Yazoo business.  If these lands exist, they’re only a hunting-ground of swamp, Indians, and buffalo.  The survey is paper, the cleared fields a fable, the town Manoa, the scheme a bubble, the purchasers fools, and the sellers knaves,—­and there’s your legal opinion in a nutshell!”

“I didn’t ask for a legal opinion,” said Mocket.  “I’m a lawyer myself.  There’s land there, you’ll not deny, and a river, and plenty of game If a Yankee doesn’t find it Paradise, he had no chance anyhow, and a Kentuck can care for himself!  There’s no sense in calling it a bubble, or being so damned scrupulous!”

Rand made a gesture of contempt.  “You let Yazoo companies and the Promised Land alone!  People are ceasing to be fools.  To-day they demand a hair of the mammoth or a sample of the salt mountain.”

Mocket ceased rustling the papers on the table, and turned to regard his chief more closely.  “Lewis, I’ve heard you say things like that more than once lately.  A year ago you were mighty respectful to Mr. Jefferson’s salt mountain and strange bones and great elk and silk grass and all the rest of it.  That was a curious letter of yours in the Examiner.  If’t was meant to defend his neutrality doings, ’twas a damned lukewarm defence!  If I hadn’t known ’twas yours, sink me if I wouldn’t have thought it a damned piece of Federal sarcasm!—­Did you send that paper to the President?”

“No, I did not send it.”

“Lewis,” said the scamp slowly, “are you breaking with Mr. Jefferson?”

Rand walked to the window and stood looking out upon the winter afternoon.  It was snowing hard, and through the drifting veil the trees across the way could hardly be discerned.  “Yes,” he said deliberately.  “Yes,—­if you call it breaking with a man to have grown away from him.  If he served me once—­yes, and greatly!—­have I not worked for him since, hand and foot?  We are quits, I think.  I shall not cease to esteem him.”