“The big fellows are grabbing off twenty-five or thirty per cent in their foreign money deals,” went on the banker.  “Tightening home credits so as to do it!  What’s fair for big is fair for little!”

“The profit is attractive, surely,” the cashier stated.

“Our stockholders have honored me right along, and I’d like to show ’em that I deserve my reputation as a financier.  I’m just finicky enough to want to clean up the last cent there is in it—­and that’s why I’m waiting for the right market.  We’ve got to hold on for a few days, at any rate.  But I reckon you feel as I do, that we’re taking chances, now that gossip is flying high!”

“I think the vault should be guarded, Mr. Britt.”

“Any suggestions as to a man?”

“I don’t know the men here well enough to choose.”

“And I know ’em so blasted well that I’m in the same box as you are.  They’re numbheads.”

The two men sat and looked at each other in silence; the matter seemed to be hung up right there, like a log stranded on a bank—­“jillpoked,” as rivermen say.

“There’s one way out of it, Frank,” blurted the president.  “Nobody cares when I come or go, nights.  I may as well sleep here as in my house, all alone.  I’ll have a cot put in the back room.”  He pointed to a door in the rear of the bank office.

Vaniman came forward with instant and eager proffer.  “That’s a job for me, Mr. Britt.”

In spite of an effort to seem casual, Britt could not keep significance out of his tone.  “It’s too bad to pen a young man up of an evening, when he can be enjoying himself somewhere.”

“It’s because I’m young that I’m insisting, sir.”

“And I suppose I’m so old that no husky robber would be afraid of me,” returned Britt, dryly.  “So you insist, do you?”

“I do.”

“I must ask you to remember that you’re doing it only because you have volunteered.”

“I’ll be glad to have you tell the directors that I volunteered and insisted.”

“Very well!  We’ll have the thing understood, Frank.  I wouldn’t want to have ’em think I was obliging you to do more than your work as cashier.”

Therefore, Vaniman had a cot brought down from Squire Hexter’s house, and borrowed a double-barreled shotgun from the same source.  He did not consider that his new duty entailed any hardship.  He had his evenings for the pachisi games.  Xoa insisted on making a visit to the bank and putting the back room in shape for the lodger.  But she vowed that she was more than ever convinced that money was the root of all evil.

Frank’s slumbers were undisturbed; he found the temporary arrangement rather convenient than otherwise.  He kindled his furnace fire before going to the Squire’s for breakfast and Britt Block was thoroughly warm when he returned.