The next day, Ebenezer Waldstricker met Lysander Letts, just back from Auburn, loitering along Buffalo Street near the Lehigh Valley station. The prison-pallor of the squatter's face and hands and the ill-fitting, cheap prison clothes on his big body made him conspicuous among the men on the street. Waldstricker pulled up his team.
"Sandy," he called, "come to the office when you're uptown. I want to see you."
An hour or so later, the squatter slouched into Waldstricker's private room.
The elder rose and greeted him.
"So you're out again?" The question was really a statement.
"Yes," assented Letts, sitting down on the edge of the chair, "an' I wouldn't a been if I hadn't been let out on good behavior. I made up my mind I wouldn't stay a minute longer'n I had to."
"I guess after this you won't be stealing dead bodies, will you?" asked the rich man.
"Nope, you bet I won't! I've enough of Auburn. It ain't like the Ithaca jail!... Heard anythin' of Tess Skinner?"
"Yes, she's got a boy over three years old."
Lysander nodded his head slowly, as if he'd received confirmation of a conclusion previously formed.
"Thought likely," he muttered. "Where air she livin'? I met Jake Brewer on the street an' he says she air left the shack."
"So she has, but not very far away.... Letts, I want you to do something for me. Are--or I might put it--do you still want to make up to the Skinner girl?"
Sandy's face grew dark with uncontrollable anger.
"I want to rip the skin offen her inch by inch," he snarled.
The other man gave a low, mirthless laugh. The picture of the girl he disliked so intensely, writhing in the great hands of the brute opposite him, appealed to the elder's sardonic humor.
"That wouldn't be a bad idea," he averred. "But she's got some one who won't see her hurt."
Letts jumped up and stepped close to the desk where the other was sitting. Here was a complication he hadn't anticipated. He moistened his dry lips with a tobacco stained tongue and demanded, "Who air he?... Air she married?"
"No, she's living in Graves' old place, the house I, now, own, with Deforrest Young."
"Ye mean, your wife's brother, the lawyer?"
Waldstricker nodded.
"An' ye say she air livin' with him?"
"Well not exactly that, I suppose, but she's keeping house for him. She's got her child there, too."
"Has, eh?" said Sandy, dryly.
A wicked look came over his face and he slouched back into his chair. Ebenezer went to his office window and looked into the street.