Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/162

 he had seen it before, nor call up a name to fit it. But he didn't like that silent tip-toeing across the floor. It wasn't his day to take another chance.

The visitor did not appear at all impressed by the cashier's gun, nor the desperate look in the man's scared white face. He held up one hand in a gesture of indulgent admonition, grinning a little, the disturbance in his dusty whisker stubs running up to his eyes, making them seem to laugh. The young man was carrying a grain sack, about half full of some lumpy matter; the horse that had brought him there stood before the door.

The president was sitting in his little railed-off place beside the cashier's cage, perplexities marshalled before him in long lines of figures, and short groups of fat figures, showing sums in addition and subtraction. There was plenty for the president of a bank that had stood a loss of over forty thousand dollars, cash, to think about in a town like McPacken, where the directors were not any too brisk about coming up with an assessment to cover it.

There was a little tin sign with gilt letters tacked on the gate opening into the president's pen, labelling him as neatly as a jar of jam. The man with the grain sack on his shoulder turned from the cashier's hostile embrasure as he read this word PRESIDENT. He turned his back to the cashier's gun with the nonchalance or ignorance of innocence.

That moment the cashier called a sharp warning to his superior, who raised his weary head, and sprang to his feet like a man aroused to flee for his life. He stood