snorted.

"If you don't quit, increase or no increase, you're crazy. If I get
you a job somewhere else in town, will you leave the bank?"

"Perhaps," said Evan; "but I'm low in energy now, you know, and I doubt
if I would make much of a hit with a strange man on a new line of work."

"If you're feeling like that you'd better go on a farm for the summer
and get your feet on solid earth."

The following morning Nelson put in his expense account covering cost
of moving from Banfield to Toronto. He did not charge the bank with
three days at a hotel, as he might have done. They might be unfair to
him, but at least he would be honest with them. Robb saw the debit
slip among the charges vouchers lying in the cash-book dish. He walked
over to the cash-book man.

"You're hopeless, Evan," he said. "You deserve to be fired."

"What's the matter?" asked Key, who was always nosing around in his
good-natured way, trying to find things out and dig clerks out.

Robb told him about the expense voucher.

"God bless the bank," said Key; "it seems to have a faculty for picking
honest boys. I wish a few professional crooks or gunmen would slip one
over on them occasionally."

Evan smiled and began to say something, when Castle came sailing along
and cried, in his high voice:

"It's pretty near time, Nelson, that you knew how to draw a sterling
draft. I don't want to have to cross one of these again."

One draft out of fourteen had escaped being red-inked. It was that
gigantic omission that brought Castle back from the front of the
office. He loved to show authority.

Robb and Key looked at one another, the assistant accountant gone, then
burst out laughing simultaneously. Evan joined them.

"There you are," said Robb, turning to the cash-book man; "that's the
kind of things the bank soaks you for. They've got a pick against you,
Nelson. I have a hunch you and I'll be left out on the increases."

The ex-manager's hunch was not quite strong enough. Evan received an
increase of $50, bringing his salary up to $400 per year, less
guarantee premiums. Robb was cut down from $1,400 to $1,250, "until he
manifested a willingness to accept what head office considered to his
interests."

Robb had refused, for personal reasons, to accept an appointment to a
place of ostracism, and that, along with the ill-will of the accountant
and assistant-accountant of Toronto, was sufficient, in the eyes of
head office, to justify t