pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow formidable curiosity which belonged to him. “You know him well?”
“Who? Mr. Gant?” Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well that the very question was amusing to him. “Why, I’ve known him all my life—I’ve known him ever since he first came to Altamont—let’s see, that’s all of forty years ago when he first came here?” Mr. Candler went on reflectively, “or no, maybe a little less than that. Wait a minute.” He considered seriously for a moment. “The first time I ever saw your father,” said Mr. Candler very slowly and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any one, but staring straight before him, “was in October, 1882—and I believe—I believe,” he said strongly, “that was the very year he came to town—yes, sir! I’m positive of it!” he cried. “For Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days—I don’t believe we had 2, 000 people there—why, that’s all in the world it was.” Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily. “The courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it—when you got two blocks away you were right out in the country. Didn’t Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars, and didn’t I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a price as that and expect to get it! Why!” Mr. Candler declared, with a full countrified laugh, “it was nothing but a mud-hole down in the holler. I’ve seen old Captain Porter’s hawgs wallerin’around in it many’s the time.’And you,’I said to him,’you—do you think I’d pay you a price like that for a mud-hole? Why, you must think I’m crazy, sure enough.’'All right,’he says,’have it your own way, but you’ll live to see the day you’ll regret not buying it. You’ll live to see the day when you can’t buy one of those lots for a thousand dollars!’One of them!” Mr. Candler now cried in hearty self-derision. “Why, if I owned one of those lots to-day, I’d be a rich man! I don’t believe you could buy a foot of that land to-day for less than a thousand dollars, could you, Bruce?” he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking man who sat beside the boy.
“Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should think,” the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and gestures. He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as he uttered these words and then sat there “all reared back” as the saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding
