Filter's eyes brightened. He looked up the account and found his difference. Henty regarded the teller with unsophisticated admiration, then, on the impulse, grabbed him by the muscles and commenced backing him around the office.
"Gee, you're a horse!" said Evan, wrenching himself free; "where did you get all that gristle?"
"In the back pasture," interpolated Filter, in jovial spirits now that he was balanced.
"Wrong there," said Henty. "I put on this stock of beef in the rear end of a mow one hot summer when the sow-thistles were bad."
While the boys were in good tune Nelson broke to them the news of Jones' resignation.
"The deuce!" exclaimed Filter, who rarely went higher.
"We don't need a manager," observed the junior, grinning, "when we've got a man who can remember deposit slips for two weeks."
Evan said nothing, but naturally he liked Henty for the flattering speech, the more so since Henty usually meant more than half of what he said. Praise is apt to be dangerous to one who draws Evan's salary; he felt himself growing more and more dissatisfied. Evan was awakening to a realization of his superiority as a bankclerk. He was a successful clerk, and he knew it; but he also knew, by now, that his success was due to labor rather than to special aptitude for that kind of work. He could not banish Jones' words from his mind; if he had expended the same amount of energy on some other business he would probably have achieved far greater efficiency than would ever be possible in banking. He doubted more and more that climbing steps into the bank was equal to shinning it up a beanstalk.
For a few days after Jones' conversation with him he was silent and thoughtful at his work. Instead of making poetic memos, like Service, in his cage, he made note of the work he waded through, and tried to picture himself in a private office. That was going one further than Jones' imaginary desk with the telephone at one's elbow, but the imagination is fertile territory.
It is difficult to say where Evan's speculations would have landed him—it is difficult to say, although the probability is he would have arrived where dissatisfied bank-boys usually do, Nowhere—had not W. W. Penton, the new manager, put in a sudden appearance.