One of the last things he saw before they broke his ribs and he lost consciousness was the face of Beauregard Barker pushing through the throng to get in his licks. Involved as he was, Ben was struck by the irony of Beau’s eagerness to land a few punches. It was more than twenty years since he’d rubbed Beau’s nose in the manure pile out back of the old livery stable and made him say uncle.
Their dislike of each other had grown during those twenty years. Beau had grown into a mealy-mouthed bank clerk who fawned on his betters and took a sadistic enjoyment out of spewing contempt on those unfortunates his bank assigned him to foreclose on because they couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments on their land. He’d married the local bank owner’s daughter, a thin-lipped sharp-nosed girl who was determined to follow in her mother’s footsteps and crack the whip over what passed for society in Glenville. One day the bank would be hers—hers and Beau’s—and both of them were feared for good reason.
As a boy, Beau had gotten his kicks out of tormenting younger children—the cause of his childhood fight with Ben. As a man, soft and running to fat, he used sarcasm as a weapon to torture people and it worked. Despite his dependency on the bank belonging to Beau’s father-in-law, Ben Malden was just about the only man in town who didn’t kowtow to Beau. Ben matched him sarcasm for sarcasm. For this Beau hated him. But he was a patient man and he knew the day would come when Ben would come under his thumb, ready to be squashed like a common bug. Now it was here. It wasn’t Beau’s thumb, but his foot that he sent crashing into Ben’s ribs. He kicked him again and again, elbowing the others aside to get at Ben. This wasn’t easy, for the blood-lust was on the crowd now and there was no stopping them.
They surely would have killed Ben if the siren sound of the sheriff’s car approaching hadn’t thrown cold water on their fury. By the time the sheriff himself and his deputy had arrived on the scene, the crowd was back at the bar. They simply told the sheriff that Ben and Luke had a fight. He and the deputy carried the two unconscious men out to the car and drove them to the local infirmary. Here Luke’s wound was dressed and he was sent on his way as soon as he recovered consciousness. But Ben had three broken ribs that had to be set and he was kept at the infirmary. That’s where Wilma found him toward morning.
“How did it happen, daddy?” she wanted to know.
“A fight.”
“What started it?”
“I was just havin’ a quiet drink when Luke Partridge and one or two other fellers come over an’ start sayin’ as how I’m out to shut down the factory an’ lose ’em their jobs. They had a few, these fellers, an’ I reckon they was none too sober. Anyway, they say it’s all over town that if I don’ sell my farm to the factory, it’s gonna shut down. The talk is the management claims if they ain’t able to expand, it don’ pay to keep the plant goin’. Well, I hear Luke an’ the others out an’ I try to tell ’em I don’ think that’s true an’ I try to make ’em see my side of it. But they’s real mean an’ they won’t listen. So pretty soon they’s callin’ me names an’ I’m callin’ a few back an’ the nex’ thing I knows, Luke, he’s pulled a knife on me.”
“You ought to have him arrested!”
“Hell, that ain’t gonna do no good, honey. You think any them fellers gonna tell it the way it happened? ’Sides, I’d have to say all of ’em ganged up on me, which they did, an’ make out a charge agin’ ’em all. I start doin’ that, the way folks feel, I’d end up tryin’ to have the whole town jugged.”
“Does everybody hate you for not selling?”
“All of ’em what makes their livin’ from the plant. An’ that’s considerable. Even the storekeepers doin’ lots better since the factory opened. They gonna side with fellers workin’ there iffen they think my not sellin’ ’ll interfere with their bread an’ butter.”
“But you aren’t going to sell, dad,”
“It’s beginnin’ to look like they might force me to. That feller they sendin’ from New York, he’s comin’ to make me sell for sure.”
“Don’t you worry about him.”
“Whatcha mean, honey?”
“You’ll see. Just don’t worry. I’m going to work out a way of handling Mr. Dawes.”
The next afternoon Wilma took the first step in her campaign of “handling Mr. Dawes.” She paid a call on Harvey and Johanna Henshaw at the house that had been rented for Dawes. “I’ve got a picture I think you’ll be interested in seeing,” she told Harvey when he answered the doorbell.
She didn’t have it with her, she admitted when she was inside. She hadn’t had it developed yet, it was in the mail to Miami where a friend of hers would have a dozen prints made for her. What she did with those prints, she told the Henshaws, would depend on whether or not they decided to cooperate with her.
They cooperated. Indeed, they were relieved that Wilma’s demands were so easily met. All she wanted the Henshaws to do was hire her as the maid for the expected new tenants.
Thus Wilma was installed in the household when Preston B. Dawes and his daughter Glory arrived a few days later. Since her father was still recuperating, Wilma had arranged with Rafe to look after the farm while she was working. It was a sleep-in job, but she had her evenings free. She spent them visiting her father and frustrating Rafe’s attempts to make love to her again. She wanted him hot and eager for when she might need a favor from him.
Her plans were hazy. Having accomplished the first step of getting herself into proximity with the Dawes family she only knew that she must probe for weak spots and be prepared to exploit them to the fullest in her efforts to save the Maiden farm. She studied Dawes and Glory and Don Corrigan—who came to dinner with them that first evening—very carefully. She saw right away that the way to get at Dawes was through his daughter.
Glory and Don were obviously very much in love. Wilma well knew that love makes people vulnerable. She had to get some kind of hold over Dawes to make him let her father alone. The love of Glory and Don was the key to getting that hold.
A few evenings later, after Mr. Dawes had gone to bed, Wilma crept down to the parlor to spy on Don and Glory. She had noticed the way their hands reached for each other, the way their bodies brushed so purposefully, and she had guessed that they must be having sex. Now Wilma wanted to check out that guess.
She went into the living room and pushed aside the curtains over the glass door separating it from the parlor. In the bright moonlight shining through the windows, she could see Glory and Don clearly. Carefully, Wilma opened the doors a hairbreadth, and then she could also hear them.
“One of these days we’re going to take off all our clothes before we do it,” Don was saying.
“Mmmm. That sounds lovely, darling.”
“I can’t wait to see you all nude.”
“But you’ve seen everything.”
“Not all at once, I haven’t.”
“Still, you’ve seen it all. You’ve seen this.” Glory stood up and unbuttoned her sweater. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The rigid tip of one of her breasts peeped out between the opened buttons. She freed the entire breast and it swelled out fully before Don’s eyes. “And this.” She freed the other breast. “And this.” She turned her back to him and raised her skirt. Her rosy buttocks jiggled enticingly, bare in the moonlight.
“And how about this?” Don turned her around, raised her skirt from the front and sank to his knees in front of her.
“You like that, do you?” Glory teased, running her fingers through his hair.