Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/35

 And the show continued. Hornblower sold the site of Schuler's Department Store for nineteen dollars with Schuler looking on; he sold the site of the City Hall for forty-two dollars with His Honor, Mayor Foster, staring indignantly; and he capped this audacity by selling the ground from under the fire-engine house at the very moment when the Mayor was threatening to have the hose turned on him. Besides these he sold lots here and there throughout the town, always for absurdly low prices, because the purchasers never assented to more than a lottery-ticket scale of value and because to create as many widely scattered contestants as possible seemed both to gratify Hornblower's cheerful malevolence and to fall in with his plans.

And there would be contestants! Oh, yes, and bitter ones, for human nature is a strange thing. Usually, when a spectator began to bid it was a monstrous jest, but the minute that first bid was spoken he began to take the matter seriously. Resentment by the legitimate owners against these pseudo-purchasers was natural and inevitable; accusations, altercations, personal encounters resulted.

But it took full two hours to work the farce up to tragedy. Nobody save Harrington had yet discerned that it might develop into tragedy, and to him now it seemed so completely a farce that the mere shouting of his name made him forget it. Glancing across the way he recognized Griff Morrison, Louis Spaulding and two or three irresponsible familiars of the Live Wire League. They sat in an open car which they had pulled up at the curb to look on for a time at Hornblower's show.

"Pile in, Hen," they shouted; "we're just heading out for the Country Club."