"Likely," he said, "it's nothin' serious. Then, ag'in, you can't tell.... You do two things, Mis' Nixon: go out to the farm and stay with my wife--Mandy'll be glad to have you ... and keep your mouth shet." "You'll find him, Mr. Baines?... You'll fetch him back to me?" "If I figger he's wuth it," said Scattergood. He went from Mrs. Nixon's to the bank, where the finance committee were gathering to discuss the situation and to discover if Ovid's disappearance were in any manner connected with the movable assets of the institution. There were Deacon Pettybone, Sam Kettleman, the grocer, Lafe Atwell, Marvin Towne--Scattergood made up the full committee. "How be you?" Scattergood said, as he sat in a chair which uttered its protest at the burden. "What d'you think?" Towne said. "Got any notions? Noticed anythin' suspicious?" "Not 'less it's that there dude suit of clothes," said Atwell, with some acidity. "You put him in here," said Kettleman to Scattergood. "Calculate I did.... Hain't found no reason to regret it--not yit. Looks to me like the fust move's to kind of go over the books and the cash, hain't it?... You fellers tackle the books and I'll give the vault an overhaulin'." Scattergood already had made up his mind that if Ovid had allowed any of the bank's funds to cling to him when he went away the shortage would be discoverable in the cash reserve, undoubtedly in a lump sum, and not by an examination of the books. It was his judgment that Ovid was not of a caliber to plan the looting of a bank and skillfully to hide his progress by a falsification of the books. That required an imagination that Ovid lacked. No, Scattergood said to himself, if Ovid had looted he had looted clumsily--and on sudden provocation.... Therefore he chose the vault for his peculiar task. It is a comparatively easy task to count the cash reserve in the vault of so small a bank. Even a matter of thirty-odd thousand dollars can be checked by one man alone in half an hour, for the small silver is packed away in rolls, each roll containing a stated sum; the larger silver is bagged, each bag bearing a label stating the amount of its contents, and the currency is wrapped in packages containing even sums.... Scattergood went to work. He went over the cash carefully, and totaled the sums he set down on a bit of paper.... He found the amount to be inadequate by exactly three thousand dollars. "Huh!" said Scattergood to himself. "Ovid hain't no hawg." One might have thought the young man had dropped in Scattergood's estimation. It would have been as easy to make away with twenty thousand dollars as with three thousand, and the penalty would not have been greater. "Kind of a childish sum," said Scattergood to himself. "'Tain't wuth bustin' up a life over--not three thousand.... Calc'late Ovid hain't _bad_--not at a figger of three thousand. Jest a dum fool--him and his tailor-made clothes...."