PAGE 2
For Value Received
by
“How much is the mortgage, Robert?” she asked calmly. The sick man gave a sighing breath of relief, and drew a worn account-book from under his pillow.
“It’ll be $287.65, interest an’ all, when it’s due,” he said, consulting his cramped figures. Each knew the amount perfectly well, but the feint of asking and telling eased them both.
“I’m going down to San Diego to see them about it,” said Nancy; “I can’t explain things in writing. There’s the money for the children’s shoes; if the rains hold off, they can go barefoot till Christmas. Mother can keep Lizzie out of school, and I guess Bobbie and Frank can ‘tend to things outside.”
A four-year-old boy came around the house wailing out a grief that seemed to abate suddenly at sight of his mother. Nancy picked him up and held him in her lap while she took a splinter from the tip of his little grimy outstretched finger; then she hugged him almost fiercely, and set him on the doorstep.
“What’s the matter with gramma’s baby?” called an anxious voice from the kitchen.
“Oh, nothing, mother; he got a sliver in his finger; I just took it out.”
“He’s father’s little soldier,” said Robert huskily; “he ain’t a-goin’ to cry about a little thing like that.”
The little soldier sat on the doorstep, striving to get his sobs under military discipline and contemplating his tiny finger ruefully.
An old woman came through the room with a white cloth in her hand.
“Gramma’ll tie it up for him,” she said soothingly, sitting down on the step, and tearing off a bandage wide enough for a broken limb.
The patient heaved a deep sigh of content as the unwieldiness of the wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to accommodate the superfluity of rag.
“There, now,” said the old woman, rubbing his soft little gingham back fondly; “gramma’ll go and show him the turkeys.”
The two disappeared around the corner of the house, and the man and woman came drearily back to their conference.
“If you go, Nancy,” said Robert, essaying a wan smile, “I hope you’ll be careful what you say to ’em; you must remember they don’t think they’re to blame.”
“I won’t promise anything at all,” asserted Nancy, hitching her angular shoulders; “more’n likely, I’ll tell ’em just what I think. I ain’t afraid of hurtin’ their feelin’s, for they hain’t got any. I think money’s a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin’ things that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off.”
Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his wife’s misshapen knuckles.
“Well, then, you hadn’t ought to be hard on ’em, Nancy; it’s no more’n natural to want to save your skin,” he said, closing his eyes wearily.
“Robert Watson?”
The teller of the Merchants’ and Fruitgrowers’ Bank looked through the bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflectively. He did not notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the shoulders of her rusty cape.
The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and aggressive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long, narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her cotton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they trembled.