“Why, la!” says Hannah, “because it’s your son, ma’am—­and you’re his mother, Dame Meadows!”

CHAPTER VI.

JOHN MEADOWS had always been an active man, but now he was indefatigable.  He was up at five every morning, and seemed ubiquitous; added a gray gelding to his black mare, and rode them both nearly off their legs.  He surveyed land in half a dozen counties—­he speculated in grain in half a dozen markets, and did business in shares.  His plan in dealing with this ticklish speculation was simple.  He listened to nothing anybody said, examined the venture himself, and, if it had a sound basis, bought when the herd was selling, and sold wherever the herd was buying.  Hence, he bought cheap and sold dear.

He also lent money, and contrived to solve the usurers’ problem—­perfect security and huge interest.

He arrived at this by his own sagacity and the stupidity of mankind.

Mankind are not wanting in intelligence; but, as a body, they have one intellectual defect—­they are muddle-heads.

Now these muddle-heads have agreed to say that land is in all cases five times a surer security for money lent than movables are.  Whereas the fact is that sometimes it is and sometimes it is not.  Owing to the above delusion the proprietor of land can always borrow money at four per cent, and other proprietors are often driven to give ten—­twenty—­thirty.

So John Meadows lent mighty little upon land, but much upon oat-ricks, wagons, advantageous leases and such things, solid as land and more easily convertible into cash.

Thus without risk he got his twenty per cent.  Not that he appeared in these transactions—­he had too many good irons in the fire to let himself be called a usurer.

He worked this business as three thousand respectable men are working it in this nation.  He had a human money-bag, whose strings he went behind a screen and pulled.

The human money-bag of Meadows was Peter Crawley.

This Peter Crawley, some years before our tale, lay crushed beneath a barrowful of debts—­many of them to publicans.  In him others saw a cunning fool and a sot—­Meadows an unscrupulous tool.  Meadows wanted a tool, and knew the cheapest way to get the thing was to buy it, so he bought up all Crawley’s debts, sued him, got judgments out against him, and raising the ax of the law over Peter’s head with his right hand, offered him the left hand of fellowship with his left.  Down on his knees went Crawley and resigned his existence to this great man.

Human creatures, whose mission it is to do whatever a man secretly bids them, are not entitled to long and interesting descriptions.

Crawley was fifty, wore a brown wig, the only thing about him that did not attempt disguise, and slouched in a brown coat and a shirt peppered with snuff.

In this life he was an infinitesimal attorney.  Previously, unless Pythagoras was a goose, he had been a pole-cat.