Prudential reasons doubtless kept him from forming a personal acquaintance with his agents. The risk of exposing himself to future blackmail must not be incurred, and one may well believe that he shrank from clasping the hands of these men, who were eagerly awaiting him. Whatever were his feelings, his desperate position suffered no halting. The storm was ready to break at any moment. In an instant he might be a wretched fugitive, with terror before him and infamy howling behind. But one way led out of this labyrinth. He had resolutely planted his feet in that way, determined to tread it to the end. He did tread it to the end, and he came out victorious. If the suspicions of any afterward pointed toward him, no syllable of the suspicions was breathed. Who dared suspect that an honorable citizen had ever, in the dead of night, crept like a robber to a meeting of outlaws, to concoct the details of an outrageous breach of trust, of a crime which--none knew it better than he--would carry life-long misery and suffering to the families of nearly every man who trusted him? [Illustration: "THE DETECTIVES SIGNALED THE BURGLARS: 'THE COAST IS CLEAR.'"--Page 57.] "The evil that men do lives after them," but where does the responsibility of its author end? Who will ever say what crimes may spring from the one act of wrongdoing, crimes committed, it may be, by persons who were directly led into them by the consequences of an act the perpetrator of which had never heard of those affected by it? How far does the responsibility of the wrongdoer extend? What weight of horror is he accumulating on his head? Such questions may perhaps occur afterward, when the pleasure has been tasted and is gone, and nothing remains of the detected crime but the ruin it has wrought; but in the excitement of laying the plot, in the glamour which the hope of success casts over the schemer, they probably never intrude, conscience is smothered, and he is left to carry out his schemes to the end. Doubtless no such thoughts disturbed the president, as he waited that night while Irving acted as go-between, carrying messages from him to the agents and from the agents back again to him. At last the arrangements were made. Duplicate keys of the safe were to be provided, and a way, to be presently explained, was to be left open to each of them. Whatever the robbers found in the safes was to be theirs, and the task of getting it was to be of the easiest. This, of course, was highly satisfactory to the thieves, but something more must be prepared for the stockholders and the public. Bank safes are not so easily emptied; there must be the appearance, at least, of great effort to effect the robbery, and marks of the effort must be left behind.