A FEW days after the report of Dora Barry’s fall had permeated Stafford from the town’s centre to its scattering outskirts, and the beautiful girl’s disgrace had been duly recorded as the now certain explanation of Fred Walton’s flight, it came to his father’s ears in a rather indirect manner. Old Simon was erroneously supposed to have learned the truth, even before it became town-talk; for it was vaguely whispered that the banker had been so moved by Mrs. Barry’s personal appeal to him in behalf of her daughter that he had called in the sheriff with the intention of having his son held to honor by sheer force, but for some reason had refrained from taking action.
There are individuals in every community, too, who are bold enough to mention a delicate topic even to those most sensitively concerned, and as old Walton was going to the bank on the morning in question Bailey Thornton, a man of great size, who kept a grocery where the banker bought his supplies, essayed a jest as he passed the old man’s morning cigar to him over the showcase. The bystanders thoroughly understood what was meant, as was evinced by the hearty laugh which went round, but the old man didn’t.
“Don’t be hard on the boy, Mr. Walton,” Thornton added, and he smiled broadly enough to explain any ordinary innuendo. “Remember your own young days. I’ll bet Fred came by it honestly. The whole town knows the truth; there is no good in trying to hide it. Tell him it is all right, and make him come back home.”
Old Simon grunted and walked on, flushing under the irritating chorus of laughter which followed him out of the store. “Come by it honestly!” he repeated. “What could the meddling fool mean? The whole town knows the truth!”
He fell to quivering, and almost came to a dead halt in the street. Surely the circumstance of the bank’s loss was not leaking out, after all his caution? He decided that he would at once sound Toby Lassiter. Perhaps Fred had confided in others. The bare chance of the shortage being known and used against him by the rival bank alarmed him. In fancy he saw the report growing and spreading through the town and country till an army of half-crazed depositors, egged on by his enemies, was clamoring at the door, and demanding funds which had been put out on collateral security, and could not be drawn in at a moment’s notice.
As he was passing along the corridor by the counting-room, where, beyond the green wire grating, the bookkeepers were at work, he caught Lassiter’s glance, and with a wild glare in his eyes he nodded peremptorily toward the rear. He had just hung up his old slouch hat and seated himself in his chair when the clerk joined him, a look of wonder in his mild eyes.
“Say, Toby, sit down—no, shut the door!” Simon ordered; and when the clerk had obeyed and taken a chair near the desk, the banker leaned toward him.
“I want to know,” he panted, “if the report is out about Fred’s shortage?”
“Why, no, Mr. Walton,” the clerk said, astonished in his turn; “that is, not to my knowledge. I haven’t heard a word that would indicate such a thing. In fact, they all seem so busy with—” But Lassiter colored deeply, and suddenly checked himself.
“Well, something is in the wind, I know,” Simon went on, his lip quivering. “It may be that Thornton only had reference to the boy’s general extravagance, or he may have heard false reports about my own bringing-up; but I am not sure, Toby, but that the thing we are trying to hide is out.” Thereupon old Simon, his anxious eyes fixed on the face of his clerk, recounted in detail all that the grocer had said, and exactly how it had come up.
“Oh, I see!” Lassiter exclaimed, in a tone of relief. “He didn’t refer to the money, Mr. Walton. He meant—” It was loyalty to his absent friend which again checked the conscientious............