husband had not been
disgraced. Penton pretended, now the danger was past, that he would
not have cared.

"It's a funny thing," he said, with an adjective, "if a man can't take
a social drink without insulting the town."

This remark was addressed to the whole staff. At times Penton was
absurdly pompous and uncommunicative before the boys; at other times he
entered into a mysterious intimacy with them, a relationship
distasteful to them. They preferred his professional tactics to those
others.

"By heck," said Henty one afternoon, after one of Penton's good-fellow
demonstrations, "I naturally hate that devil!"

Nelson laughed immoderately, in the way one laughs who has been under a
strain too long. Filter, even, thought the remark funny.

"I understand," he said, "that Penton has bought all his furniture on
credit from Hunter's."

"Who told you?" asked Evan, interestedly.

"Jack Hunter," replied the ledger-keeper.

Nelson consulted his thoughts. He was conscious of an addition to the
vague fear he already cherished.

The end of the month (January) kept the Banfield staff so busy they had
little time to discuss the one great theme--Penton. He kept to his
office pretty well and seemed to read the newspaper for hours every
day. He did work a little on the loan return, after Evan had balanced
the liability ledger, but left the totals to his teller. For one
thing, however, Penton deserved credit: he was the most industrious
signer of names that ever escaped jail for forgery. He even initialed
items on the general ledger balance-sheet, where initials were
ridiculous, to give the impression that he had checked the work.

For the first week in February the boys worked every night. Henty's
face kept its color, but Nelson began to look like Filter. The
ledger-keeper plodded so slowly and fondled his ledger so tenderly, his
pasty face did no worse than remain pasty. There was new vim for him
in every new account opened. He knew the names of every man, woman and
child in his ledger. He might be moved away any time, and all his
special knowledge would become useless to him--Filter knew that--but he
did not live in his ledger from a sense of duty: he just loved
clerically killing time. He was too lazy or too unoriginal to think,
so he kept his mind occupied with insignificant things, and made an
ideal clerk.

It was afternoon, toward the end of a certain week in February. Henty
had been down to a grain