Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/67

 in anger; then she regretted the outburst. He was not here to answer back; it was unfair to quarrel with the dead. But even tolerance for the crotchet of a dead man yielded no dollars. The ransacked house was bare of coin as the sweep of the divide down to the dooryard. After several hours' searching Hilma went back to the mantel and, leaning her elbows on it, stood looking down at a little stack of silver piled thereon—three silver dollars, a quarter and two dimes. Yesterday Uncle Alf had put the money there; he said he had found it in her father's pockets.

Three silver dollars, a quarter and two dimes! This was the available capital Hilma had to start a life alone. To be sure, there was that two thousand dollars in the Two Moons bank, thirty miles away. But the girl never had been inside a bank, knew nothing about banks. She was more than half convinced that nobody but the one who deposited that money would be recognized by the bank people as competent to withdraw it. Bankers were all sharks she had heard her father say many times.

The girl went to the flour barrel, took stock of the sides of bacon on the nails over the wood