There was no need to urge Dave to drive on. He was as anxious to reach the place as his master, and in a few minutes the black horses were reined up at the door of the bank, the crowd dividing right and left to give them way, and staring at the figure the judge presented, standing now on the seat and shaking his fist at the faces confronting him. There were at least one hundred people there—men, women and children, especially boys, some frantically pushing and elbowing each other in their efforts to get to the door, from which two or three were emerging with a satisfied look on their faces and something held tight in their hands. Others were spectators drawn there from curiosity, but all filling the walk and the street, and making Fred Lansing think of a mob he once saw in Paris. He had sprung to the ground and said to his uncle: “David had better take the ladies home at once. This is no place for them.” “Yes, yes,” the judge replied, and when his sister asked if she should tell his wife to stop the party, he answered: “Stop the party! Thunder! No; why should she? That would be confessing I was broke. I ain’t by a long shot. I’ve money enough to pay these cattle a hundred times over. Not in the bank this minute, of course. But I can get it. The cusses! What do they mean? Running me! Me!” He shook his fist threateningly at the crowd, one of whom, a ragged boy, called out derisively: “Shake away, old money bags; nobody’s afraid of you, but my mother wants her fifty dollars, and she’s goin’ to have it. She put ten dollars in Saturday, and nobody told her you was busted.” The judge did not hear him. He was struggling up the steps, assisted by Fred to the door, where he was met by Herbert, who was white as a corpse, with a scared look on his face. “Oh, father,” he cried, “I’m so glad you have come. I should have sent for you, but thought you were off in the country driving. There’s the old Harry to pay.” “Pay him then! There’s money enough,” the judge roared, going behind the screens and facing the two women presenting their claims and demanding their money, which they promptly received. It was a genuine run, such as small places like Merivale seldom see, and just how it commenced, or why, no one could tell, unless it were Godfrey Sheldon, who was a weak-brained, pig-headed, jealous man, thinking far too much of himself since his one term in the Legislature. He was very proud of his friendship with Judge White, whom he would sometimes slap on the shoulder and call “old boy,” by way of showing his familiarity with the great man of the town. He knew he was the heaviest depositor in the White Bank, and presumed a good deal on that account, and sometimes chafed because no attention was ever paid his family by Mrs. White and not much by Herbert. “My girls are as good as anybody,” he was wont to say of his two red-headed daughters, who fully concurred with him in his opinion of themselves.