The Big Mogul by Joseph C. Lincoln — Read

Foster Townsend chose this time to dispense with Varunas's services and society on his drive to Ostable. He piloted the span himself, along the rutted stretches of yellow sand, between villages and over the white-surfaced roads of oyster and clamshell leading through the thickly settled portions of the villages themselves. And in Denboro and South Denboro and East Ostable and Ostable his progress was, as always, noticed and commented upon. Leading citizens bowed politely and called good mornings and the proletariat turned to stare and look after him. He acknowledged the bows and salutes with a careless wave of the hand and the stares he ignored. The universal attention was no novelty. Its absence would have been. He was the great man of his county and reverend recognition of that fact was his due.

Only in Denboro, the town adjacent to Harniss, was there a reminder that his supremacy was questioned. As the span trotted proudly along its main road he looked up to the top of the little hill behind the Methodist church and saw a rambling white house rising behind a high screen of lilac bushes and shadowed by wind-twisted silver-leaf poplars. He frowned as he looked, for in that house dwelt the two most disturbing factors in his life at present, Elisha Cook, his one-time partner, and Bob Griffin, whom he had begun to consider quite as much of a nuisance as his grandfather. The frown changed to a grim smile, however, as he reflected that one nuisance, at least, was to be abated. Esther would soon be beyond Griffin's reach. Absence, so the proverb declared, made the heart grow fonder, but it was his firm conviction, based upon years of experience, that if the absence was long enough it was much more likely to cure a heartache than to augment it, especially when the patient was as young as his niece. That was a good suggestion of Reliance Clark's, that of sending Esther away. He probably would have thought of it himself sooner or later, but her suggestion had been timely and had prevented what might have been dangerous delay. He was grateful to Reliance and he must stop in at the Clark cottage soon and tell her so. He had not called on her for nearly a month.