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 mortgage to the Sullivan County Land and Investment Company, of which he afterward became a director. They squeezed the interest out of Matt implacably. When he could no longer meet it they foreclosed. Matt was now paying them rent. He was allowed to occupy the farm only because no one else wanted it. And he might well have regarded his brother as the heartless leech who had bled and impoverished him all his life.

Curiously enough, he did not so regard him. "Well," he would say, "that's the way Ben is"—with a sort of philosophic and superior contempt. It was the contempt of a wronged man who knows that he has done nothing to deserve the injustice that has been done him. All the anger was on Ben's side. He felt toward his brother as if Matt had been an opponent who had lost to him in a card game, and who blamed him instead of blaming his own unskilfulness or his ill luck. The game was over. He had come to Matt—with his winnings in his little satchel—prepared to talk sense to him. And Matt, walking away from him like a contemptuous dumb animal, compelled him to follow ignominiously. Every step that he took added to the insult.

Matt came to the swampy edge of the lake where there was an unfinished landing-place made of stakes driven in like a row of piles to hold a filling of loose rocks. And tied to one of the stakes was a flat-bottomed punt, unpainted, coffin-shaped,