"I meant the Farmers'," I said.
"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The old bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo. The other banks do most of the commercial business—all of it, you might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting richer and richer every day."
"Agatha is married?" I asked.
"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with young Copper-Money was broken off—nobody knew just how or why—shortly after your—er—shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a half ago. Agatha's out West somewhere now—in a sanitorium, I believe. Her health has been rather poor for the last year or so."
This was news indeed. As I had known her as girl and woman, Agatha Geddis had always been the picture of health. I put up a fervent little prayer that her particular sanitorium might not prove to be in the vicinity of Denver. If it should be it meant another move for me.
"I didn't see the finish of the bank trouble before they buried me, did I, Barton?" I queried.
"You bet your life you didn't! There was the dickens to pay all around. Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors' losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of the stockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank. When they came to count noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing but to quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, until they held only enough to give them their votes. There was a yell to raise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across. It teetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; and I heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who had been buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr. Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha—and didn't. Geddis and Withers played it mighty fine—and mighty low-down."
All this was a revelation to me. In my time Geddis and Withers together had held a majority of the stock in the close little corporation known as the Farmers' Bank. The despicable trick by means of which Geddis, or both of them, had shifted the defalcation loss to other shoulders proved two things conclusively: that the scheme had been well planned for in advance, and that the two old men had worked in collusion. I remembered my suspicion—the one I couldn't prove—that Withers had been as deep in the mud as Geddis was in the mire.
"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired.
"Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss,' as he said. Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-hearted and generous, Geddis bought it in, personally—at ten cents on the dollar."