Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/109

ADVENTURE COMES SMILING bank over, and saw how the sun would shine in at the door and through the wide windows during the greater part of the afternoon, and hoped that the cashier was a human being and would not object to a fake robbery. Not liking suspense, he stepped off the pavement and dodged a jitney, and hurried over to interview the cashier.

You never know what secret ambitions hide behind the impassive courtesy of the average business man. This cashier, for instance, wore a green eyeshade whenever his hat was not on his head. His hair was thin and his complexion pasty and his shoulders were too stooped for a man of his age, You never would have suspected, just to look at him through the fancy grating of his window, how he thirsted for that kind of adventure which fiction writers call red-blooded. He had never had an adventure in his life; but at night, after he had gone to bed and adjusted the electric light at his head, and his green eyeshade, and had put two pillows under the back of his neck, he read—you will scarcely believe it, but it is true—he read about the James boys and Kit Carson and Pawnee Bill, and he could tell 97