BY FRANK H. CONVERSE.
I am Phil Morris, fourteen years old, and the youngest clerk in Covert Savings-Bank. The cashier is my uncle Jack, and he began at the bottom, where I am, when he was a boy. He says that a boy had better grow up with a country bank than go West and grow up with the country. He thinks there's more money in it.
"If there's anything in you," he said one day, "you'll work your way up to be bank president some time." And I guess it's better to be president of a country bank than to be President of the United States. Anyway, you wouldn't have to be shot before folks began to find out that you were doing your level best to keep things straight. Uncle Jack says and does such queer things sometimes that people say he's odd. They tell about his being so wrapped up in our bank that he never had time to hunt up a wife. I notice, though, that when father and mother died, and left me a wee little baby, Uncle Jack found time to bring me up, and give me a good education to boot. Oh, he's as good as gold or government bonds, Uncle Jack is.
We live in rooms over the bank, where old Mrs. Halstead keeps house for us. Underneath, we do the business. There's heaps of money in our two big vaults.
Last summer—and, mind you, this was while I was away on vacation—two men broke into the building. They came up stairs, and into Uncle Jack's room. One had a bull's-eye lantern that he flashed in Uncle Jack's face as he sat up in bed, and the other pointed a big pistol right at his head.
"Tell us where the vault keys are, or I'll shoot you," he said.
"Oh, Uncle Jack," I broke in, when he was telling me about it, "what did you do?"
"What would you have done?" he asked, in his odd way.
"I know what I wouldn't have done," I answered him, straightening up a bit—"I wouldn't have given 'em the keys."
"Ah!" Uncle Jack says, kind of half doubtful, and then went on: "Well, I told them to shoot away. And they knew as well as I did that shooting wouldn't bring them the keys. So when they found they couldn't frighten me, the scoundrels tied me, and went off in a rage, with my watch and pocket-book."