Vona had stumbled to a chair; she was staring about her, trying to control her horror and steady her mind so that she might comprehend what had happened.  Under a stool she saw a crumpled coat; she leaped from her chair, secured it, and sat down again.  It was Frank’s office coat; both sleeves were ripped and the back breadths were torn.  She held it forward in her shaking hands for the inspection of the bank examiner.  But Mr. Starr was too intent on other matters to take heed of the pathetic proof of violence.  He was particularly concerned with what he had found in one corner.

Literally, thousands of small metal disks were heaped and scattered there.  Some of the disks had rolled to all parts of the room.  The Prophet had been scraping up handfuls of them, inspecting them, and throwing them toward the corner where the main mass lay.

Starr picked up some of them.  They were iron; each disk was perforated.

There were many canvas sacks near the heap of disks; the sacks were ripped and empty.  Mr. Starr secured one of them.  Its mouth was closed with the seal with which specie sacks are usually secured.

But Mr. Starr saw something else in the corner, an object at which he peered; the gloom made the results of his scrutiny uncertain.  He stooped and picked up that object, making it the third of the trinity of exhibits.  It was a large square of pasteboard, the backing of an advertising calendar.  Starr carried it to the lamp on the table.  There was writing on the placard.  The characters were large and sprawling.  The bank examiner tapped his finger on the writing, calling for the attention of the anguished president.  The legend read: 

This is a hell of a bank!

“Britt, if this is a sample of your whole stock of specie,” Starr rumbled, holding a disk between thumb and forefinger, “the profanity is sort of excused by the emphasis needed.  I really think I would have been obliged to say the same, after counting up.”

“I can’t understand it,” the president muttered.

“Did you suppose you carried actual coin in those bags?”

“Yes—­gold and some silver.”

“Had you counted it?”

“I left the checking up to the cashier.”

“Where do you think your cashier is, right now?”

Britt flapped his hands, helplessly confessing that he did not know.

In all the room there was a profound hush.  The crowd had been straining aural nerves, trying to hear what was being said by the men in authority.

Nobody had been paying any attention to Prophet Elias, who had been crawling like a torpid caterpillar.  For some moments he had been rigidly motionless in one spot.  He was leaning against the front of the vault, his ear closely pressed to the crevice at the base of the door.

He straightened up on his knees and shouted in such stentorian tones that all in the room jerked their muscles in sudden fright.  “Swine!  Fools!”