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“One morning, on the hottest day of the hottest July I ever knew — and you know what that means down here — I left the bank to call on a man named Harlan and collect some money that ‘d come due on a note. Harlan had the cash waiting for me all right, and when I counted it I found it amounted to three hundred dollars and eighty-six cents the change being in brand new coin that Harlan had drawn from another bank that morning. I put the three one-hundred-dollar bills in my wallet and the change in my vest pocket, signed a receipt and left. I was going straight back to the bank.

“Outside the heat was terrible. It was enough to make you dizzy, and I hadn’t been feeling right for a couple of days, so, while I waited in the shade for a street-car, I was congratulating myself that in a month or so I’d be out of this and up where it was some cooler. And then, as I stood there, it occurred to me all of a sudden that outside of the money which I’d just collected, which, of course, I couldn’t touch, I didn’t have a cent in my pocket. I’d have to walk back to the bank, and it was about fifteen blocks away. You see, on the night before, I’d found that my change came to just a dollar, and I’d traded it for a bill at the corner store and added it to the roll in the bottom of my trunk. So there was no help for it — I took off my coat and I stuck my handkerchief into my collar and struck off through the suffocating heat for the bank.

“Fifteen blocks — you can imagine what that was like, and I was sick when I started. From away up by Juniper Street — you remember where that is; the new Mieger Hospital’s there now — all the way down to Jackson. After about six blocks I began to stop and rest whenever I found a patch of shade wide enough to hold me, and as I got pretty near I could just keep going by thinking of the big glass of iced tea my mother’d have waiting beside my plate at lunch. But after that I began getting too sick to even want the iced tea — I wanted to get rid of that money and then lie down and die.

“When I was still about two blocks away from the bank I put my hand into my watch pocket and pulled out that change; was sort of jingling it in my hand; making myself believe that I was so close that it was convenient to have it ready. I happened to glance into my hand, and all of a sudden I stopped up short and reached down quick into my watch pocket. The pocket was empty. There was a little hole in the bottom, and my hand held only a half-dollar, a quarter and a dime. I had lost one cent.

“Well, sir, I can’t tell you, I can’t express to you the feeling of discouragement that this gave me. One penny, mind you — but think; just the week before a runner had lost his job because he was a little bit shy twice. It was only carelessness; but there you were! They were all in a panic that they might get fired themselves, and the best thing to do was to fire some one else — first.

“So you can see that it was up to me to appear with that penny.

“Where I got the energy to care as much about it as I did is more than I can understand. I was sick and hot and weak as a kitten, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything except find or replace that penny, and immediately I began casting about for a way to do it. I looked into a couple of stores, hoping I’d see some one I knew, but while there were a few fellows loafing in front, just as you saw them today, there wasn’t one that I felt like going up to and saying: ‘Here! You got a penny?’ I thought of a couple of offices where I could have gotten it without much trouble, but they were some distance off, and besides being pretty dizzy, I hated to go out of my route when I was carrying bank money, because it looked kind of strange.