"May the thunder-bolt strike him!" he cried. "I will lay hands on him. I will choke that money out of his black soul. Come, we will go!"
They rushed out, boiling with rage, only to find a crowd of other dupes before the shabby little office in the side-alley. The tightly closed door and the blank windows told the story more clearly than any words. Skeemersky had gone--the bank was no more!
Despair took strong hold of Stefan. For two days he roamed the streets, not eating nor drinking, sleepless. He saw no further, no hope--all was blackness and desolation. When he came back to the boarding house on the third day he found a letter from Agatha. He read it with tears and intolerable anguish and he passionately kissed the final sentence: "Every bit of me is yours and I shall never change." This tender faith was balm to his anguish.
He put the letter in a pocket nearest his heart, while a new look came to his tired face. Almost unconsciously he began to build a new future on the ruins of the old.
He swiftly mapped out his course. The season for farmwork was at hand. He would go back to the open skies and broad fields of God's world. He packed a few belongings in the rusty brown-paper suitcase and boarded the trolley for the long ride. He knew what he should do if he could rent a suitable piece of land.
He had spent the previous summer on a farm in the onion-growing section of the Connecticut Valley; he knew what large profits might be gotten with hard labor from a comparatively small plot of ground. He figured that three or four acres would give him the needed amount in the fall, if he had health and good weather.
He found the man whom he sought, secured the land, and went to work. All that season he slaved early and late, weeding on his knees in the damp earth the interminable rows of tiny, delicate plants where the weeds sprang like magic. He heeded neither scorching sun, nor soaking rain. He cared nothing for the monotony of the toil. Always he saw before him the steamer that should bring Agatha, from the hazards of war, to him and security.
By September he had once again the dream within his grasp. He was back in the old room in the crowded boarding house, and in his bluish tin trunk at the foot of the bed were hidden five hundred and fifteen dollars in crisp, clean notes. His earliest belief in his trunk had come back a hundredfold. He would not trust any bank, private or national, with the fruit of his heart-breaking toil. Banking systems and government investments were all beyond his grasp. Skeemersky had taught him to distrust others--the little thin trunk would not run away.