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 carrying the proceeds home in currency. They usually trusted it to their home banks after getting there, although there were some who never had any use for banks except when they wanted a loan.

Sid Colburn had carried the cash instead of a draft partly because he was old-style, principally because he enjoyed the feeling of opulence attending the possession of much currency. There was a sense of wealth in a gripsack full of bills, that no draft, no matter how well engraved, could impart. In the morning Sid would deposit most of the money in the Drumwell bank, with a large feeling of satisfaction as he stacked the bills in the teller's window, thousand by thousand, with calculative deliberation, each packet bound by the little strip of paper as it had come from the big institution at the stockyards in Kansas City.

There were several men in the barroom when the Bar-Heart-Bar gang strolled in picking pork out of their teeth in genteel and comfortable style; more were arriving from near and far, promising a merry night and a long one, for it was raining, one of those drizzling autumn rains which might hold on for two or three days. One could pretty well judge the distance each new arrival had come by the state of his humidity, which ranged from damp to dripping.

Coburn said, as he viewed the slickers of the newcomers glistening under the lights, that they were in a good place for a night like that. The rest of them concurred to the boss' opinion, unanimously, for once, and paired off for a game of old sledge. Wallace Ramsey declined to disconcert the balance of the table, preferring