Now Janice knew this to be Mr. Crompton, the vice-president of the Middletown Trust Company. Mr. Crompton was said to be a man with expensive tastes and an expensive family in the bargain. She had heard, more than once, remarks made about the extravagance of the Cromptons. But only lately had Mr. Crompton been of much importance in the bank.
The president and his family were in Europe; Mr. Crompton had succeeded to more power and now what Mrs. MacKay said led Janice to fear that the vice-president had misused this power.
“Archie says the expert accountants are coming into the bank to-morrow. He will be questioned. He has been forced to make some entries in his books that he believes he should not have made. He can explain; but the facts may hurt my Archie if he is obliged to look for another position. And we were getting on so well! Ah, me!”
Janice did not give the matter much attention at the time, although she sympathized with Mrs. MacKay. The widow knew well enough that she could trust Janice to say nothing regarding the expected trouble in the bank. The girl’s own money was in the keeping of the Merchants & Farmers National, and she had no reason to worry about it.
Indeed, it never entered Janice’s mind that the trouble at the trust company was likely to bother the depositors, and that some of those depositors might be her friends and acquaintances, until the next evening at supper time. Uncle Jason chanced to remark:
“Wal, them that has got it already, has it handed to ’em on silver salvers, by jinks! D’ye hear what that old tight-wad Concannon’s gone and done? He’s got that piece of sawmill land that belonged to the Protherick Estate—got it for sixteen thousand dollars. Paid a thousand down, and his mortgage on the Steamboat Company for fifteen thousand come due last week and was paid. He’s got the fifteen thousand in the Middletown Trust—told me so himself—to pay the rest of the purchase price of the sawmill tract.
“I’ll say one thing for him,” added Uncle Jason, wagging his head in one direction and chewing solemnly in the other, “he took a risk. He ain’t no piker, the Elder hain’t. He risked his thousand dollars when he paid it down, fur he didn’t know fur sure as the Steamboat Company would take up their mortgage; and he’d had trouble gittin’ fifteen thousand on any security he could offer at this time. Banks won’t lend on timber land or farm property, ye know.”
These remarks made small impression on Janice’s mind at the moment. She was not much interested in Elder Concannon’s affairs. But sometime during the night it must have been, the two ideas combined. Mrs. MacKay’s anxiety about her Archie and the Trust Company, and the fact that Elder Concannon had fifteen thousand dollars that he needed to use at once on deposit in that same financial institution.
Janice drove around by the Lower Middletown Road that morning, which brought her past Hopewell Drugg’s, of course. Little Lottie ran out to hail her joyfully.
“Oh, Janice! come see my dress—do, do! It’s so pretty. And Miss ’Rill says I’m to have flowers on it, and a wreath on my hair.” Lottie was to be one of the flower-girls at the wedding, and she, as well as Janice, was much excited by the forthcoming event.