I
Life in the small towns of the older West moves slowly--almost as slowly
as in the seaport villages or little towns of the East. Towns like Tyre
and Bluff Siding have grown during the last twenty years, but very
slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees. Lying too far away from the
Mississippi to be affected by the lumber interest, they are merely
trading-points for the farmers, with no perceivable germs of boom in
their quiet life.
A stranger coming into Belfast, Minnesota, excites much the same languid
but persistent inquiry as in Belfast, New Hampshire. Juries of men,
seated on salt-barrels and nail-kegs, discuss the stranger's appearance
and his probable action, just as in Kittery, Maine, but with a lazier
speech-tune, and with a shade less of apparent interest.
On such a rainy day as comes in May after the corn is planted--a cold,
wet rainy day--the usual crowd was gathered in Wilson's grocery-store at
Bluff Siding, a small town in "The Coally Country." They were farmers,
for the most part, retired from active service. Their coats were of
cheap diagonal or cassimere, much faded and burned by the sun; their
hats, flapped about by winds and soaked with countless rains, were also
of the same yellow-brown tints. One or two wore paper collars on their
hickory shirts.
McIlvaine, farmer and wheat-buyer, wore a paper collar and a butterfly
necktie, as befitted a man of his station in life. He was a short,
squarely made Scotchman, with sandy whiskers much grayed, and with a
keen, intensely blue eye.
"Say," called McPhail, ex-sheriff of the county, in the silence that
followed some remark about the rain, "any o' you fellers had any talk
with this feller Sanford?"
"I hain't," said Vance. "You, Bill?"
"No; but somebody was sayin' he thought o' startin' in trade here."
"Don't Sam know? He generally knows what's goin' on."
"Knows he registered from Pittsfield, Mass., an' that's all. Say, that's
a mighty smart-lookin' woman o' his."
"Vance always sees how the women look. Where'd you see her?"
"Came in here the other day to look up prices."
"Wha'd she say 'bout settlin'?"
"Hadn't decided yet."
"He's too slick to have much business in him. That waxed mustache gives
'im away."
The discussion having reached that point where his word would have most
effect, Steve Gilbert said, while opening the hearth to rap out the ashes
of his pipe, "Sam's wife heerd that he was kind o' thinkin' some of goin'
into business here, if things suited 'im first-rate."
They all knew the old man was aching to tell something, but they didn't
purpose to gratify him by any questions. The rain dripped from the awning
in front, and fell upon the roof of the storeroom at the back with a soft
and steady roar.
"Good f'r the corn," McPhail said, after a long pause.
"Purty cold, though."
Gilbert was tranquil--he had a shot in reserve.
"Sam's wife said his wife said he was thinkin' some of goin' into a bank
here--"
"A bank!"
"What in thunder--"
Vance turned, with a comical look on his long, placid face, one hand
stroking his beard.
"Well, now, gents, I'll tell you what's the matter with this town. It
needs a bank. Yes, sir! I need a bank."
"You?"
"Yes, me. I didn't know just what did ail me, but I do now. It's the need
of a bank that keeps me down."
"Well, you fellers can talk an' laugh, but I tell yeh they's a boom goin'
to strike this town. It's got to come. W'y, just look at Lumberville!"
"Their boom is our bu'st," was McPhail's comment.
"I don't think so," said Sanford, who had entered in time to hear these
last two speeches. They all looked at him with deep interest. He was a
smallish man. He wore a derby hat and a neat suit. "I've looked things
over pretty close--a man don't like to invest his capital" (here the rest
looked at one another) "till he does; and I believe there's an opening
for a bank."
As he dwelt upon the scheme from day to day, the citizens warmed to him,
and he became "Jim" Sanford. He hired a little cottage, and went to
housekeeping at once; but the entire summer went by before he made his
decision to settle. In fact, it was in the last week of August that the
little paper announced it in the usual style:
Mr. James G. Sanford, popularly known as "Jim," has decided to open an
exchange bank for the convenience of our citizens, who have hitherto been
forced to transact business in Lumberville. The thanks of the town are
due Mr. Sanford, who comes well recommended from Massachusetts and from
Milwaukee, and, better still, with a bag of ducats. Mr. S. will be well
patronized. Success, Jim!
The bank was open by the time the corn-crop and the hogs were being
marketed, and money was received on deposit while the carpenters were
still at work on the building. Everybody knew now that he was as solid as
oak.
He had taken into the bank, as bookkeeper, Lincoln Bingham, one of
McPhail's multitudinous nephews; and this was a capital move. Everybody
knew Link, and knew he was a McPhail, which meant that he "could be tied
to in all kinds o' weather." Of course the McPhails, McIlvaines, and the
rest of the Scotch contingency "banked on Link." As old Andrew McPhail
put it:
"Link's there, an' he knows the bank an' books, an' just how things
stand"; and so when he sold his hogs he put the whole sum--over fifteen
hundred dollars--into the bank. The McIlvaines and the Binghams did the
same, and the bank was at once firmly established among the farmers.
Only two people held out against Sanford, old Freeme Cole and Mrs.
Bingham, Lincoln's mother; but they didn't count, for Freeme hadn't a
cent, and Mrs. Bingham was too unreasoning in her opposition. She could
only say: "I don't like him, that's all. I knowed a man back in New York
that curled his mustaches just that way, an' he wa'n't no earthly good."
It might have been said by a cynic that Banker Sanford had all the
virtues of a defaulting bank cashier. He had no bad habits beyond
smoking. He was genial, companionable, and especially ready to help when
sickness came. When old Freeme Cole got down with delirium tremens that
winter, Sanford was one of the most heroic of nurses, and the service was
so clearly disinterested and magnanimous that every one spoke of it.
His wife and he were included in every dance or picnic; for Mrs. Sanford
was as great a favorite as the banker himself, she was so sincere, and
her gray eyes were so charmingly frank, and then she said "such funny
things."
"I wish I had something to do besides housework. It's a kind of a
putterin' job, best ye can do," she'd say, merrily, just to see the
others stare. "There's too much moppin' an' dustin'. Seems 's if a woman
used up half her life on things that don't amount to anything, don't it?"
"I tell yeh that feller's a scallywag. I know it buh the way 'e walks
'long the sidewalk," Mrs. Bingham insisted to her son, who wished her to
put her savings into the bank.
The youngest of a large family, Link had been accustomed all his life to
Mrs. Bingham's many whimsicalities.
"I s'pose you can smell he's a thief, just as you can tell when it's
goin' to rain, or the butter's comin', by the smell."
"Well, you needn't laugh, Lincoln. I can," maintained the old lady,
stoutly. "An' I ain't goin' to put a red cent o' my money into his
pocket--f'r there's where it 'ud go to."
She yielded at last, and received a little bank-book in return for her
money. "Jest about all I'll ever get," she said, privately; and
thereafter out of her brass-bowed spectacles with an eagle's gaze she
watched the banker go by. But the banker, seeing the dear old soul at the
window looking out at him, always smiled and bowed, unaware of her
suspicion.
At the end of the year he bought the lot next his rented house, and began
building one of his own, a modest little affair, shaped like a pork-pie
with a cupola, or a Tam-o'-Shanter cap--a style of architecture which
became fashionable at once.
He worked heroically to get the location of the plow-factory at Bluff
Siding, and all but succeeded; but Tyre, once their ally, turned against
them, and refused to consider the fact of the Siding's position at the
centre of the county. However, for some reason or other, the town woke up
to something of a boom during the next two years. Several large farmers
decided to retire and live off the sweat of some other fellow's brow, and
so built some houses of the pork-pie order, and moved into town.
This inflow of moneyed men from the country resulted in the establishment
of a "seminary of learning" on the hillside, where the Soldiers' Home was
to be located. This called in more farmers from the country, and a new
hotel was built, a sash-and-door factory followed, and Burt McPhail set
up a feed-mill.
All this improvement unquestionably dated from the opening of the bank,
and the most unreasoning partisans of the banker held him to be the chief
cause of the resulting development of the town, though he himself
modestly disclaimed any hand in the affair.
Had Bluff Siding been a city, the highest civic honors would have been
open to Banker Sanford; indeed, his name was repeatedly mentioned in
connection with the county offices.
"No, gentlemen," he explained, firmly, but courteously, in Wilson's store
one night; "I'm a banker, not a politician. I can't ride two horses."
In the second year of the bank's history he went up to the north part of
the state on business, visiting West Superior, Duluth, Ashland, and other
booming towns, and came back full of the wonders of what he saw.
"There's big money up there, Nell," he said to his wife.
But she had the woman's tendency to hold fast to what she had, and would
not listen to any plans about moving.
"Build up your business here, Jim, and don't worry about what good
chances there are somewhere else."
He said no more about it, but he took great interest in all the news the
"boys" brought back from their annual deer-hunts "up north." They were
all enthusiastic over West Superior and Duluth, and their wonderful
development was the never-ending theme of discussion in Wilson's store.