Eless stream into the company's great bins. The railroad was only five
miles away, and Hendricks was sitting in his office in the bank going
over and over his estimates of the year's crop which was still lying in
the field,--save the crop from less than two thousand acres that was
harvested and threshed. From that he judged that there would be enough
to redeem his share of the farmers' mortgages, which in Hendricks' mind
could be nothing but rent for the land, and to pay his share of the
bank's fraudulent loans to the company--and leave nothing more. The fact
that John expected to buy back the mortgages from Eastern investors who
had bought them, and then squeeze the farmers out of their land by the
option to buy hidden in the contract, did not move Hendricks. He saw his
duty in the matter, but as the golden flood rose higher in the bins, and
as hour after hour rolled by bringing him nearer and nearer to the time
when Molly Culpepper should marry Adrian Brownwell, a temptation came to
him, and he dallied with it as he sat figuring at his desk. The bank was
a husk. Its real resources had been sold, and a lot of bogus
notes--accommodation paper, they called it--had taken the place of real
assets. For Hendricks to borrow money of any other institution as the
officer of the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge would be a
crime. And yet he knew that ten thousand dollars would save her, and his
brain was wrought with a madness. And so he sat figuring while the hours
slipped by, trying to discount his future income from the wheat to
justify himself in taking the money from the bank's vaults. His figures
did not encourage him. They showed him that to be honest with the
farmers he might hope for no profit from that year's crop, and with two
years of failure behind him, he knew that to discount the next year's
crop would be nothing less than stealing. Then, strong and compelling,
came the temptation to let the farmers fight it out with the Eastern
investors. The temptation rocked the foundations of his soul. He knew it
was wrong; he knew he would be a thief, if he did it, no matter what the
law might say, no matter what the
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