"Rob him," Caruthers spoke up with energy. "We'll pay him back."
"How?"
"Oh, you know how. With a little money we can get a start. We can rent an office on the ground floor, and then business will come."
"Yes," said Lyman, "but I don't want that old man to be mixed up in the excitement. Suppose we try the bank."
"You try it. McElwin does not care for me particularly. Suppose you go over and see him. Offer him a mortgage on our library."
"I'll do it. Wait until Uncle Buckley has been pumped; I want to bid him good-bye."
"Go through there, and see him on your way out. The bank will be closed pretty soon."
"All right. But don't hang a hope on the result."
Lyman shook hands with Uncle Buckley, and then went across the street to the First National Bank, the financial pride of Old Ebenezer. The low brick building stood as a dollar mark, to be stared at by farmers who had heard of the great piles of gold heaped therein, and James McElwin, as with quick and important step he passed along the street, was gazed upon with an intentness almost religious. Numerous persons claimed kinship with him, and the establishment of third or fourth degree of cousinhood had lifted more than one family out of obscurity. The bank must have had a surplus of twenty thousand dollars, a glaring sum in the eyes of the grinding tradesmen about the public square. An illustrated journal in the East had printed McElwin's picture, together with a brief history of his life. The biographer called him a self-made man, and gave him great credit for having scrambled for dimes in his youth, that he might have dollars in middle life. That he had once gone hungry rather than pay more than the worth of a meal at an old negro's "snack house," was set forth as a "sub-headed" virtue. He had married above him, the daughter of a neighboring "merchant," whose name was stamped on every shoe he sold. The old man died a bankrupt, but the daughter, the wife of the rising capitalist, remained proud and cool with dignity. The union was illustrated with one picture, a girl, to become a belle, a handsome creature, with a mysterious money grace, with a real beauty of hair, mouth and eyes. The envious said that circumstances served to make an imperious simpleton of her.
It was this man, with these connections, that Lyman crossed the street to see. But to the lawyer it was not so adventurous as grimly humorous. His Yankee shrewdness had pronounced the man a pretentious fraud.