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Black ruin was staring them all in the face, she said, and I could save them, if I only would. What would be shouted from the housetops as a penitentiary offense in the president of the bank would be condoned as a mere error in judgment on the part of a hired bookkeeper.
If I would only consent to let the directors think that I was the one who had passed upon and accepted the mining-stock collateral--which had taken the place in the bank's vault of the good, hard money of the depositors--well, I could see how easily the dreadful crisis would be tided over; and besides earning the undying gratitude of the family, her father would stand by me and I would lose nothing in the end.
For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't believe herself--that the crime wasn't a crime. Her father, "our eminent and public-spirited fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to quote the editor of the Glendale Daily Courier, was desperately involved. For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well. At the long last the half-dozen sleepy directors, three of them retired farmers and the other three local merchants, had awakened to the fact that there was something wrong. They didn't know fully, as yet, just what they were in for; Geddis's part of the bookkeeping was in a horrible muddle owing to his efforts to hide the defalcation. But they knew enough to be certain that somebody had been skating upon thin ice and had broken through.
"You can't help seeing just how it is, Herbert," Agatha had pleaded, with the soulful look in her pretty eyes and the baby lips all in a tremble. "If the faintest breath of this gets out, VanBruce Wheeland will have to know, and then everything will come to an end and I shall want to go and drown myself in the river. You are young and strong and brave, and you can live down a--an error of judgment"--she kept on calling it that, as if the words had been put into her mouth; as they probably had. "Promise me, Herbert, won't you?--for--for the sake of the old times when you used to carry my books to school, and I--I----"
What was the use? Every man is privileged to be a fool once in a while, and a young man sometimes twice in a while. I promised her that I would shoulder the load, or at least find some way out for her father; and when she asked me how it could be done, I was besotted enough to explain how the mining-stock business had really passed through my hands--as it had in a purely routine way--and telling her in so many words that everything would be all right for her father when the investigating committee should come to overhaul the books and the securities.
When I got up to go, she went to the front steps with me, and at the last yearning minute a warm tear had splashed on the back of my hand. At that I kissed her and told her not to worry another minute. And this brings me back to that other evening just twenty-four hours later; I in the bank, with the accusing account books spread out under the electric light on the high desk, and old John Runnels, looking never a whit less the good-natured, easy-going town marshal in his brass-buttoned uniform and gilt-banded cap, stumbling over the threshold as he let himself in at the side door which had been left on the latch.
I had started, half-guiltily, I suppose, when the door opened; and Runnels, who had known me and my people ever since my father had moved in from the farm to give us children the advantage of the town school, shook his grizzled head sorrowfully.
"I'd ruther take a lickin' than to say it, but I reckon you'll have to come along with me, Bertie," he began soberly, laying a big-knuckled hand on my shoulder. "It all came out in the meetin' to-day, and the d'rectors 're sayin' that you hadn't ort to be allowed to run loose any longer."
The high desk stool was where I could grab at it, and it saved me from tumbling over backward.
"Go with you?" I gasped. "You mean to--to jail?"
Runnels nodded. "Jest for to-night. I reckon you'll be bailed, come mornin'--if that blamed security comp'ny that's on your bond don't kick up too big a fight about it."
"Hold on--wait a minute," I begged. "There is nothing criminal against me, Uncle John. Mr. Geddis will tell you that. I----"
The big hand slipped from my shoulder and became a cautionary signal to flag me down.
"You mustn't tell me nothin' about