“Say,” he inquired, addressing the clerk in charge, “say, where’d this come from?”

“Why, let’s see.  We got that from a second-hand store up on Polk Street, I guess.  It’s a fairly good machine; a little tinkering with the stops and a bit of shellac, and we’ll make it about’s good as new.  Good tone.  See.”  And the clerk drew a long, sonorous wail from the depths of McTeague’s old concertina.

“Well, it’s mine,” growled the dentist.

The other laughed.  “It’s yours for eleven dollars.”

“It’s mine,” persisted McTeague.  “I want it.”

“Go ’long with you, Mac.  What do you mean?”

“I mean that it’s mine, that’s what I mean.  You got no right to it.  It was stolen from me, that’s what I mean,” he added, a sullen anger flaming up in his little eyes.

The clerk raised a shoulder and put the concertina on an upper shelf.

“You talk to the boss about that; t’ain’t none of my affair.  If you want to buy it, it’s eleven dollars.”

The dentist had been paid off the day before and had four dollars in his wallet at the moment.  He gave the money to the clerk.

“Here, there’s part of the money.  You—­you put that concertina aside for me, an’ I’ll give you the rest in a week or so—­I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” he exclaimed, struck with a sudden idea.

McTeague had sadly missed his concertina.  Sunday afternoons when there was no work to be done, he was accustomed to lie flat on his back on his springless bed in the little room in the rear of the music store, his coat and shoes off, reading the paper, drinking steam beer from a pitcher, and smoking his pipe.  But he could no longer play his six lugubrious airs upon his concertina, and it was a deprivation.  He often wondered where it was gone.  It had been lost, no doubt, in the general wreck of his fortunes.  Once, even, the dentist had taken a concertina from the lot kept by the music store.  It was a Sunday and no one was about.  But he found he could not play upon it.  The stops were arranged upon a system he did not understand.

Now his own concertina was come back to him.  He would buy it back.  He had given the clerk four dollars.  He knew where he would get the remaining seven.

The clerk had told him the concertina had been sold on Polk Street to the second-hand store there.  Trina had sold it.  McTeague knew it.  Trina had sold his concertina—­had stolen it and sold it—­his concertina, his beloved concertina, that he had had all his life.  Why, barring the canary, there was not one of all his belongings that McTeague had cherished more dearly.  His steel engraving of “Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Court” might be lost, his stone pug dog might go, but his concertina!

“And she sold it—­stole it from me and sold it.  Just because I happened to forget to take it along with me.  Well, we’ll just see about that.  You’ll give me the money to buy it back, or——­”