“Too late—­too late!  He’s gone!  Fool that I am! always a fool!  Thirty thousand—­ass that I am!  Oh, why didn’t I say fifty thousand!”

He plunged his hands into his hair and leaned his elbows on his knees, and fell to rocking himself back and forth in anguish.  Mrs. Hawkins sprang in, beaming: 

“Well, Si?”

“Oh, con-found the con-founded—­con-found it, Nancy.  I’ve gone and done it, now!”

“Done what Si for mercy’s sake!”

“Done everything!  Ruined everything!”

“Tell me, tell me, tell me!  Don’t keep a body in such suspense.  Didn’t he buy, after all?  Didn’t he make an offer?”

Offer?  He offered $10,000 for our land, and——­”

“Thank the good providence from the very bottom of my heart of hearts!  What sort of ruin do you call that, Si!”

“Nancy, do you suppose I listened to such a preposterous proposition?  No!  Thank fortune I’m not a simpleton!  I saw through the pretty scheme in a second.  It’s a vast iron speculation!—­millions upon millions in it!  But fool as I am I told him he could have half the iron property for thirty thousand—­and if I only had him back here he couldn’t touch it for a cent less than a quarter of a million!”

Mrs. Hawkins looked up white and despairing: 

“You threw away this chance, you let this man go, and we in this awful trouble?  You don’t mean it, you can’t mean it!”

“Throw it away?  Catch me at it!  Why woman, do you suppose that man don’t know what he is about?  Bless you, he’ll be back fast enough to-morrow.”

“Never, never, never.  He never will comeback.  I don’t know what is to become of us.  I don’t know what in the world is to become of us.”

A shade of uneasiness came into Hawkins’s face.  He said: 

“Why, Nancy, you—­you can’t believe what you are saying.”

“Believe it, indeed?  I know it, Si.  And I know that we haven’t a cent in the world, and we’ve sent ten thousand dollars a-begging.”

“Nancy, you frighten me.  Now could that man—­is it possible that I —­hanged if I don’t believe I have missed a chance!  Don’t grieve, Nancy, don’t grieve.  I’ll go right after him.  I’ll take—­I’ll take—­what a fool I am!—­I’ll take anything he’ll give!”

The next instant he left the house on a run.  But the man was no longer in the town.  Nobody knew where he belonged or whither he had gone.  Hawkins came slowly back, watching wistfully but hopelessly for the stranger, and lowering his price steadily with his sinking heart.  And when his foot finally pressed his own threshold, the value he held the entire Tennessee property at was five hundred dollars—­two hundred down and the rest in three equal annual payments, without interest.

There was a sad gathering at the Hawkins fireside the next night.  All the children were present but Clay.  Mr. Hawkins said: 

“Washington, we seem to be hopelessly fallen, hopelessly involved.  I am ready to give up.  I do not know where to turn—­I never have been down so low before, I never have seen things so dismal.  There are many mouths to feed; Clay is at work; we must lose you, also, for a little while, my boy.  But it will not be long—­the Tennessee land——­”