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 ier's window. I don't know just how it happened, it was done so quick, only that two men with guns came bustin' in the bank and lined all of us but Tom Laylander up with faces to the wall. I don't know what happened next, they were shootin' things up so in front of the bank. I looked around to see if they'd killed Mr. Crowley. Two men were in his cage, throwin' everything out of the safe into a sack."

"Was one of them Tom Laylander?" Louise asked, with the breath of what seemed her last hope.

"Honey, I'm afraid it was."

"Puttin' the money in a sack! And him such an honest lookin' boy!"

"Mr. Crowley played dead, layin' flat on the floor, huggin' the wall of the cage," Maud continued, as the surgeon in this desperate case who must push on in excruciating mercy to the end. "They didn't touch him."

"Wasn't that robber holding a gun on Tom Laylander, Maud?" Louise inquired, with the slow, calm surety in her words of a lawyer who has come to the turning-point of his case.

"Honey, I couldn't see from where I stood, and I only had a glance. The one that had us lined up took a shot at me when he saw me look around."

"Took a shot at you!" Goosie exclaimed, with such appreciation that it amounted almost to delight.

"Heaven above!" Mrs. Cowgill said.

"It was just a bluff, I guess," said Maud. "It hit