“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Sam, with slow contempt, which brought the muddy blood into the sallow cheek in front of him.  “She wouldn’t look at you.  I’m not afraid of no man, Andy Offitt,—­I’m afraid of money.”

He flattered his jealous heart by these words.  It was too intolerable to think that any mere man should take his sweetheart away from him; and though he felt how hopeless was any comparison between himself and Farnham, he tried to soothe himself by the lie that they were equal in all but money.

His words startled his friend Offitt.  He exclaimed, “Why, who does she know that’s got money?”

But Sleeny felt a momentary revolt against delivering to even his closest confidant the name of the woman he loved coupled with the degrading suspicions by which he had been tormented all day.  He gruffly answered:  “That’s none of your business; you can’t help me in this thing, and I ain’t agoin’ to chin about it any more.”

They sat for awhile in silence, drank their beer, and ordered more.  Offitt at last spoke again: 

“Well, I’ll be hanged if you ain’t the best grit of any fellow I know.  If you don’t want to talk, a team of Morgan horses couldn’t make you.  I like a man that can hold his tongue.”

“Then I’m your huckleberry,” said Sleeny, whose vanity was soothed by the compliment.

“That’s so,” said Offitt, with an admiring smile.  “If I wanted a secret kept, I’d know where to come.”  Then changing his manner and tone to an expression of profound solemnity, and glancing about to guard against surprise, he said:  “My dear boy, I’ve wanted to talk to you a long time,—­to talk serious.  You’re not one of the common kind of cattle that think of nothin’ but their fodder and stall—­are you?”

Now, Sam was precisely of the breed described by his friend, but what man ever lived who knew he was altogether ordinary?  He grinned uneasily and answered: 

“I guess not.”

“Exactly!” said Offitt.  “There are some of us laboring men that don’t propose to go on all our lives working our fingers off to please a lot of vampires; we propose to have a little fairer divide than heretofore; and if there is any advantage to be gained, we propose to have it on the side of the men who do the work.  What do you think of that?”

“That’s all solid,” said Sleeny, who was indifferently interested in these abstractions.  “But what you goin’ to do about it?”

“Do!” cried Offitt.  “We are goin’ to make war on capital.  We are goin’ to scare the blood-suckers into terms.  We are goin’ to get our rights—­ peaceably, if we can’t get them any other way.  We are goin’ to prove that a man is better than a moneybag.”  He rattled off these words as a listless child says its alphabet without thinking of a letter.  But he was closely watching Sam to see if any of these stereotyped phrases attracted his attention.  Sleeny smoked his cigar with the air of polite fatigue with which one listens to abstract statements of moral obligations.