MR. TULLOSS was at his desk. He could see from where he sat out into the tile-floored, neat-caged banking room, where tidy clerks handled money like merchandise. His bank was the heart of the community. It pumped, and life-giving blood went out, circulated and came back again. But, of course, sometimes it did not come back. That was Mr. Tulloss's tragedy.
Even then, naturally, something came in its place; notes, mortgages, what not, and these paid interest. There were those who said that, asked suddenly to name a number between one and ten, Mr. Tulloss would say nine automatically, and ten if he had his wits about him.
He had seen his bank grow from a one-story wooden affair to its present size; he had lived through two holdups, and in one he had been shot—preferring death to losing money, his enemies insisted. There was a rumor that the bullet was still lodged in the flesh under his left shoulder blade, and that when he was tempted to lend money on adequate security he always leaned back in his chair, so he could feel it.
But if he was a hard man he was a just one. He had been a cattleman in the old easy days; he knew that curious triumph of hope over experience which is at once the cow-man's glory and his destruction. He had warned his customers against overexpansion during and following the war, and had lived to see their ranches go for less than the cost of the fencing and buildings on them. He could not carry them all. Some of them left him and went to little fly-by-night banks which had sprung up overnight during that period of inflation, and, doing business on a shoe string, had promptly collapsed when the hard times came, carrying their wreckage with them.
On this particular morning, however, he was not looking
