"You're right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away.
The teller came back to his place.
"Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He has not been down for two or three days: one of his children is very sick. I'll make a note of it, however, and draw his attention to it when he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle.
"Can you tell me where he lives?" asked Nancy.
The young man hesitated.
"I don't believe I would go to the house; they say it's something contagious"—
"I'm not afraid," interrupted Nancy grimly.
The teller wrote an address, and slipped it toward her with a nimble motion, keeping his hand outstretched for the next comer, and smiling at him over Nancy's dusty shoulder.
The woman turned away, suddenly aware that she had been blocking the wheels of commerce, and made her way through the knot of men that had gathered behind her. Outside she could feel the sea in the air, and at the end of the street she caught a glimpse of a level blue plain with no purple mountains on its horizon.
Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman from "up toward Pinacate" who was about to lose her home on a mortgage. She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave on the edge of the barley-field.