But
even as he went he knew there could be none. The squid had had its will
with him, not he with the squid; and within him rose again all the old
hatred and fear of these people from whom he had desired to extract full
payment for the black days of need he had endured, for the want, the
squalor, the starvation he had passed through.
But the reckoning left him where he had started--save for the money they
had used when he forced it on them--not thanking him.
So he went to his lawyers--every day for a while, then every week,
then, toward the end of winter, less often, for he had less time now,
and there was a new pressure which he was beginning to feel vaguely
hostile to him in his business enterprises--hitches in the negotiations
of loans, delays, perhaps accidental, but annoying; changes of policy in
certain firms who no longer cared to consider acreage as investment; and
a curiously veiled antagonism to him in a certain railroad, the
reorganisation of which he had dared once to aspire to.
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