Dominie Dean by Ellis Parker Butler

B. C. BURTON, the president of the Riverside National Bank, was a widower, and led an existence that can be described as calmly and good-naturedly detached. He was a younger son of a father long since dead, who had established the Burton, Corley & Co. bank, which had prospered, and finally taken a national banking charter. Corley had furnished the capital for the original bank, and the Burton family had run the business. B. C. -- he was usually called by his initials -- had married Corley's only daughter, and had thus acquired the Corley money. After his wife's death his wealth was estimated as a hundred thousand dollars; the truth was that old Corley had invested badly, and left his daughter no more than twenty-five thousand. At the time of his marriage B. C. owned nothing but his share of the bank stock, worth about twenty thousand.

In spite of his reputation as a banker, B. C. was a poor business man where his own affairs were concerned. During his wife's life his own bank stock increased in value to about twenty-five thousand dollars, but he managed to lose all of the twenty-five thousand his wife had brought him, and when she died he had nothing but his house and his bank stock. In the four or five years since his wife's death he had continued his misfortunes, and had pledged fifteen thousand dollars' worth of his bank stock to old Peter Grimsby, one of the bank's directors. Thus, while Riverbank counted B. C. Burton a wealthy man, the bank president was worth a scant ten thousand dollars, plus a house worth five or six thousand. The bank stock brought him six per cent, and his salary was two thousand; he had an income of about twenty-six hundred dollars which the town imagined to be ten or fifteen thousand.