"And you say Geddis is still running the bank?"
"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it. As you'd imagine, Farmers' Bank stock was mighty nearly a drug in the market, after all the bills had been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as they put it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back. I don't know what they paid; different prices, I suppose. But Hawkins, our manager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar, flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."
It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me. If I had been as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been a white-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees who had deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them both coming and going. And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honored and respected—or at least they were out of jail and able to live and flourish among their deluded victims.
The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested. It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to sit and listen to him.
But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot of sweetened jam. In the midst of things, at a moment when I was gratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretched life-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of a new face at the farther end of the dining-car. A large-framed man with drooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and the dining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for the newcomer at the well-filled tables.
I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the drooping mustaches. For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in the office of the State penitentiary. His name was William Cummings, and he was the deputy warden.
IX
The Cup of Trembling
Why I should have chosen, haphazard, and solely because it chanced to be the first that offered, a train which numbered among its passengers not only a man from my home town of Glendale, but also the deputy warden of the penitentiary, is one of those mysteries of coincidence which we discredit impatiently when we run across them in fiction, but which, nevertheless, are constantly recurring in every-day life.