“Why, after this flood, I guess, Mr. Rickard.” The question was unexpected. Every one knew Casey now by sight. The cashier glanced at his tie. Casey had forgotten his pin that morning.
“That’s the way it looked to me. There is too much desert in this town, Desert Hotel, Desert Reclamation Company, and now this—The Desert! If you would only put ‘bank’ on it! It looks as though you thought you were going to be washed out, as if you were saving your gold-leaf. A bank has got to keep up a bold front, if it’s only plate-glass, Mr. Cashier.”
“Hold on!” called young Oliver. “Wait a minute, Mr. Rickard. I guess you did not understand what I meant. There is no one to finish this lettering! The man who was doing it owns a ranch over in Wistaria. He is the only man who can do it. He is down at the river, fighting to save his crop.”
“Then I’d finish it myself,” said Rickard, “or get some one down from Los Angeles who could,” and left the bank.
A sign hanging from a neighboring door, “For Sail,” caught his eye.
The owner of the store peered out at the group of giggling Indians. “Fried Eggs,” as the irreverent young engineers had dubbed him, waved them away from an empty crate. It was not a bad simile, thought Rickard, smiling at the orange-colored mop which crowned the albumen-like whiteness of the house-bleached face of Fred Eggers. He stopped to watch the man’s queer antics. From shelf to counter he bounced, an anxious eye on his open crate on the platform where the group of covetous squaws and bucks encroached. Rickard was vastly amused. Eggers waddled out of the door, obscured by his bales of brilliant calico. He waved back the Indians. He threw his bundle into the crate, and sidled into the store for another load, his eyes still challenging the Indians. His distress was comical. They were his best customers; he must not drive them away, but he could not trust them. He snatched up a bolt of blue and white gingham, and was back on the platform. “Stand back, stand back,” he urged. “Don’t you see that you are in my way?”
They giggled maddeningly.
The man’s distress was maudlin. He jumped sidewise into his store, picking up his scattered stock by finger sense only, his eyes riveted on the squaws. Haste, concern, were written all over the corpulent unwieldy body, in the unlined pasty face of “Fried Eggs.”
“Moving away, Mr. Eggers?” Rickard called out to him.
It had been a long time since he had been dignified by that name. He turned to answer, and in that instant a swarthy Amazon snatched a small roll of turkey red calico, and hid it under her amply ruffled skirt. He did not see his loss.