fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to
quote the editor of the Glendale _Daily Courier_, was desperately
involved. For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a
Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well. At
the long last the half-dozen sleepy directors, three of them retired
farmers and the other three local merchants, had awakened to the fact
that there was something wrong. They didn't know fully, as yet, just
what they were in for; Geddis's part of the bookkeeping was in a
horrible muddle owing to his efforts to hide the defalcation. But they
knew enough to be certain that somebody had been skating upon thin ice
and had broken through.
"You can't help seeing just how it is, Herbert," Agatha had pleaded,
with the soulful look in her pretty eyes and the baby lips all in a
tremble. "If the faintest breath of this gets out, VanBruce Wheeland
will have to know, and then ever-
ything will come to an end and I shall
want to go and drown myself in the river. You are young and strong and
brave, and you can live down a--an error of judgment"--she kept on
calling it that, as if the words had been put into her mouth; as they
probably had. "Promise me, Herbert, won't you?--for--for the sake of
the old times when you used to carry my books to school, and I--I----"
What was the use? Every man is privileged to be a fool once in a
while, and a young man sometimes twice in a while. I promised her that
I would shoulder the load, or at least find some way out for her
father; and when she asked me how it could be done, I was besotted
enough to explain how the mining-stock business had really passed
through my hands--as it had in a purely routine way--and telling her in
so many words that everything would be all right for her father when
the investigating committee should come to overhaul the books a-