Old Adwanko's scalp money is still there--if it ever was there; but
it is my surmise that the cruel redskin is much more likely to have
spent his blood money for rum than to have left it behind him in the
Den.
CHAPTER XVIII
JIM DOANE'S BANK BOOK
During the month of June that summer there was a very ambiguous affair
at our old place.
Nowadays, if you lose your savings-bank book all you have to do is to
notify the bank to stop payment on it. In many other ways, too,
depositors are now safeguarded from loss. Forty years ago, however, when
savings banks were newer and more autocratic, it was different. The bank
book was then something tremendously important, or at least depositors
thought so.
When the savings bank at the village, six miles from the old home farm
in Maine, first opened for business, Mr. Burns, the treasurer, gave each
new depositor a sharp lecture. He was a large man with a heavy black
beard; as he handed the new bank book to the depositor, he would say in
a dictatorial tone:
"Now here is your _bank book_." What emphasis he put on those words! "It
shows you what you have at the bank. Don't fold it.
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