you
are a dead man!"

At this Andrew Galbraith saw that the end was nigh and gathered himself
for a final effort at time-killing. It was absurd; he had no such
balance to his personal credit; such a check would not be honored; it
would be an overdraft, and the teller would very properly-- In the midst
of his vehement protests the stranger sprang out of his chair, stepped
back a pace and raised his weapon.

"Mr. Galbraith, you are juggling with your life! Write that check while
there is yet time!"

A sound of subdued voices came from the anteroom, and the beleaguered
old man stole a swift upward glance at the face of his persecutor. There
was no mercy in the fierce blue eyes glaring down upon him; neither
compassion nor compunction, but rather madness and fell murder. The
summons came once again.

"Do it quickly, I say, before we are interrupted. Do you hear?"

Truly, the president both heard and understood; yet he hesitated one
other second.

"You will not? Then may God have mercy----"

The hammer of the levelled pistol clicked. Andrew Galbraith shut his
eyes and made a blind grasp for pen and check-book. His hands were
shaking as with a palsy, but the fear of death steadied them suddenly
when he came to write.

"Indorse it!" was the next command. The voices had ceased beyond the
partition, and the dead silence was relieved only by the labored
strokes of the president's pen and the tap-tap of the typewriter in the
adjacent anteroom.

The check was written and indorsed, and under the menace of the revolver
Andrew Galbraith was trying to give it to the robber. But the robber
would not take it.

"No, I don't want your paper: come with me to your paying teller and get
me the money. Make what explanation you see fit; but remember--if he
hesitates, you die."

They left the private office together, the younger man a short half-step
in the rear, with his pistol-bearing hand thrust under his coat.
MacFarland, the stenographer, was at his desk in the corner of the
anteroom. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the unwonted thing, the
president's forthfaring with a stranger who had somehow gained access to
the private room during the sacred half-hour, would have made him look
up and wonder. But this was the hundredth time, and Andrew Galbraith's
anxious glance aside was wasted upon MacFarland's back.

Still the president did not despair. In the public lobby there would be
more eyes to see, and perhaps some that woul