“Why, hell,” Mr. Brill protested in a hurt tone. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”
“No-o!” Uncle Bascom howled derisively. “No-o! By no means, by no means, by no means! You said motter. The word is not motter. The word is motto: m-o-t-t-o! M-O-T-T-O does not spell motter,” he remarked with vicious decision.
“What does it spell?” said Mr. Brill.
“It spells motto,” Uncle Bascom howled. “It has always spelled motto! It will always spell motto! As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: A-a-men!” he howled huskily in his most evangelical fashion. Then, immensely pleased at his wit, he closed his eyes, stamped at the floor, and snarled and snuffled down his nose with laughter.
“Well, anyway,” said Brill, “no matter how you spell it, it’s not how mucha we want, it’s how mucha you got! That’s the way we feel about it!”
And this, in fact, without concealment, without pretence, without evasion, was just how Brill did feel about it. He wanted everything that was his and, in addition, he wanted as much as he could get. And this rapacity, this brutal and unadorned gluttony, so far from making men wary of him, attracted them to him, inspired them with unshakable confidence in his integrity, his business honesty. Perhaps the reason for this was that concealment did not abide in the man: he published his intentions to the world with an oath and a roar of laughter—and the world, having seen and judged, went away with the confidence of this Italian—that Brill was “one fine-a man!” Even Bascom, who had so often turned upon his colleague the weapons of scorn, contempt, and mockery, had a curious respect for him, an acrid sunken affection: often, when the old man and his nephew were alone, he would recall something Brill had said and his powerful and fluent features would suddenly be contorted in that familiar grimace, as he laughed his curious laugh which was forced out, with a deliberate and painful effort, through his powerful nose and his lips, barred with a few large teeth. “Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!… Of course!” he said, with a nasal rumination, as he stared over the apex of his great bony hands, clasped in meditation—“of course, he is just a poor ignorant fellow! I don’t suppose—no, sir, I really do not suppose that Brill ever went to school over six months in his life!—Say!” Bascom paused suddenly, turned abruptly with his strange fixed grin, and fastened his sharp old eyes keenly on the boy: in this sudden and abrupt change, this transference of his vision from his own secret and personal
