"Well, let me tell you the girl had a motive--or thought she had,"
said the stranger unpleasantly. "But she had no right to spend her
money that way. You spoke just now of the village as being ruined
years ago by the villainy of one man. That's a lie! The village
ruined the man.... Never looked at it that way; did you? Andrew
Bolton had the interests of this place more deeply at heart than any
other human being ever did. He was the one public-spirited man in the
place.... Do you know who built your church, young man? I see you
don't. Well, Andrew Bolton built it, with mighty little help from
your whining, hypocritical church members. Every Tom, Dick and Harry,
for miles about; every old maid with a book to sell; every cause--as
they call the thousand and one pious schemes to line their own
pockets--every damned one of 'em came to Andrew Bolton for money, and
he gave it to them. He was no hoarding skinflint; not he. Better for
him if he had been. When luck went against him, as it did at last,
these precious villagers turned on him like a pack of wolves. They
killed his wife; stripped his one child of everything--even to the
bed she slept in; and the man himself they buried alive under a
mountain of stone and iron, where he rotted for eighteen years!"
The stranger's eyes were glaring with maniacal fury; he shook a
tremulous yellow finger in the other's face.
"Talk about ruin!" he shouted. "Talk about one man's villainy! This
damnable village deserves to be razed off the face of the earth! .
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