“He should have put him to work, that’s what.”

“He should have said to Manuel, ’Look here, if you want a dollar, go earn it first.’”

As a matter of fact, only one man ever gave Boaz the advice direct.  That was Campbell Wood.  And Wood never sat in that shop.

In every small town there is one young man who is spoken of as “rising.”  As often as not he is not a native, but “from away.”

In this town Campbell Wood was that man.  He had come from another part of the state to take a place in the bank.  He lived in the upper story of Boaz Negro’s house, the ground floor now doing for Boaz and the meagre remnant of his family.  The old woman who came in to tidy up for the cobbler looked after Wood’s rooms as well.

Dealing with Wood, one had first of all the sense of his incorruptibility.  A little ruthless perhaps, as if one could imagine him, in defence of his integrity, cutting off his friend, cutting off his own hand, cutting off the very stream flowing out from the wellsprings of human kindness.  An exaggeration, perhaps.

He was by long odds the most eligible young man in town; good looking in a spare, ruddy, sandy-haired Scottish fashion; important, incorruptible, “rising.”  But he took good care of his heart.  Precisely that; like a sharp-eyed duenna to his own heart.  One felt that here was the man, if ever was the man, who held his destiny in his own hand.  Failing, of course, some quite gratuitous and unforeseeable catastrophe.

Not that he was not human, or even incapable of laughter or passion.  He was, in a way, immensely accessible.  He never clapped one on the shoulder; on the other hand, he never failed to speak.  Not even to Boaz.

Returning from the bank in the afternoon, he had always a word for the cobbler.  Passing out again to supper at his boarding-place, he had another, about the weather, the prospects of rain.  And if Boaz were at work in the dark when he returned from an evening at the Board of Trade, there was a “Good night, Mr. Negro!”

On Boaz’s part, his attitude toward his lodger was curious and paradoxical.  He did not pretend to anything less than reverence for the young man’s position; precisely on account of that position he was conscious toward Wood of a vague distrust.  This was because he was an uneducated fellow.

To the uneducated the idea of large finance is as uncomfortable as the idea of the law.  It must be said for Boaz that, responsive to Wood’s unfailing civility, he fought against this sensation of dim and somehow shameful distrust.

Nevertheless his whole parental soul was in arms that evening, when, returning from the bank and finding the shop empty of loungers, Wood paused a moment to propose the bit of advice already referred to.

“Haven’t you ever thought of having Manuel learn the trade?”

A suspicion, a kind of premonition, lighted the fires of defence.