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THE COUNTRY BOY
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hose nearly all the time. I washed the streets from morning till it was too dark to see the stream. We caused a few runaways, but that had to be expected; we couldn’t stay old-fashioned just to suit the farmers with shy teams. Silverton had most everything from a Good Templar’s lodge to a bank. The bankers in Silverton were rather unusual as they didn’t look like the bankers at Salem. And the fact of Jake McClaine in that banking firm made the name of Coolidge & McClaine, Bankers, the greatest banking institution in the world by a big wide margin; that is, if you count all the deeds that bankers do, both in and out of the bank. They were poor young men when they stopped their covered wagons on the banks of a stream called Silver Creek, and began to look around for better country. They made a few short rides around the valley and mountains, but they came back and finally settled and called the settlement Silverton, and finally people stopped there and took corner lots without crowding. These men were great workers and knew the art of saving. They bought the first crop of calves in their neighborhood and kept them until