ou don't know what. I do. It's the
other two. Therefore I say to you, Mr. Robert Hendricks, that two and
two make six, because God loves the Irish, and for no other reason on
earth."

So much for the dreams of Molly, the memories of Bob, and the vagaries
of Mr. Dolan. They were as light as air. But in John Barclay's life a
vision was rising--a vision that was real, palpable, and vital; a
vision of wealth and power,--and as the days and the months passed,
the shadow of that vision grew big and black and real in a score of
lives.

CHAPTER XV

As June burned itself gloriously into July, Robert Hendricks no longer
counted the weeks until Molly Culpepper should be married, but counted
the days. So three weeks and two days, from the first of July, became
three weeks, then two weeks and six days, and then one week and six
days, and then six days, five days, four days, three days; and then it
became seventy-two hours. And the three threshing machines of the
Golden Belt Wheat Company were pouring their ceaseless stream into the
company's great bins. The railroad was only five miles away, and
Hendricks was sitting in his office in the bank going over and over
his estimates of the year's crop which was still lying in the
field,--save the crop from less than two thousand acres that was
harvested and threshed. From that he judged that there would be enough
to redeem his share of the farmers' mortgages, which in Hendricks'
mind could be nothing but rent for the land, and to pay his share of
the bank's fraudulent loans to the company--and leave nothing more.

The fact that John expected to buy back the mortgages from Eastern
investors who had bought them, and then squeeze the farmers out of
their land by the option to buy hidden in the contract, did not move
Hendricks. He saw his duty in the matter, but as the golden flood rose
higher in the bins, and as hour after hour rolled by bringing him
nearer and nearer to the time when Molly Culpepper should marry Adrian
Brownwell, a temptation came to him, and he dallied with it as he sat
figuring at his desk. The bank was a husk. Its real resources had been
sold, and a lot of bogus notes--accommodation paper, they called
it--had taken the place of real assets. For Hendricks to borrow money
of any other institution as the officer of the Exchange National Bank
of Sycamore Ridge would be a crime. And yet he knew that ten thousand
dollars would save her, and his brain was wrought wi