“I’m not asking him for money,” grumbled Oliver. “I’ve got a little laid by. Enough to tide me over for quite a while. He seems to think I’m scheming to get my hands on some of his. In fact, he said so the other day when I merely mentioned that if I could scrape up a few extra thousand I could triple it in no time by draining all this end of the swamp and turning it into as fine pasture land as you’d find in the state. I even took him down to the swamp and showed him that it is possible and feasible. He called me a rattle-brained idiot.” “Well,” said Serepta gently, “maybe you can carry out the plan after he is gone, Oliver. He’s pretty old. He will leave everything he has to you when he dies. He is a very thrifty man and he has prospered. So you will be pretty well off.” “God knows I would like him to live to be a hundred, Aunt Serepta—so let’s not talk of his dying.” CHAPTER XI OLD OLIVER DISAPPEARS Shortly before three o’clock on the afternoon of June 23rd; old Oliver Baxter stepped into the bank at the corner of Clay and Pershing streets and drew out thirty-five hundred dollars in currency. He gave no reason to the teller or to the cashier for the withdrawal of so large an amount in cash. He asked for a thousand in twenty dollar bills, the balance in fifties and hundreds. Receiving and pocketing the money, he strode out of the bank and turned his steps homeward. His balance at the bank was a fairly large one. Moreover, he owned considerable stock in the institution. The Baxter Hardware Company was no longer an insignificant concern dealing in tools, tinware, nails; it was an “establishment.” You could buy plows there; reapers, binders and mowers; furnaces and boilers, ice boxes and washing-machines; pots, kettles and cauldrons; stoves, ranges and brass-headed tacks; cutlery, crockery and stout hemp rope; step-ladders, wheel-barrows and glass door-knobs; log-chains, dog-chains and fly-wheel belts; coffee-mills, pepper-pots and bathroom scales; currycombs, skillets and housemaid’s mops. The staff consisted of three clerks and a book-keeper, and, now that farm machinery was included in the stock, an “annex” in the shape of a long corrugated-iron shed reached out from the rear of the store and took up all the available space between the Baxter Block and Stufflebean’s Laundry on the north. People were right when they said that young Oliver would fall into a very snug little fortune—and a thriving, well-established business besides—when his father died.