"You darling Ted," was Jennie’s commendation. "You must have given momma
five hundred dollars at least. Now I hope you’ll be able to save a
little for yourself."
At the bank, Teddy’s younger colleagues were sympathetic, Lobley
especially doing him kindly little turns. He asked him to supper one
evening at a restaurant, where they talked of marksmanship, at which
Teddy had been proficient in the navy. He was out of practice now, he
said, to which Lobley had replied that it was a pity. He, Lobley, had an
automatic pistol illegally at home, and if Teddy would like to borrow it
he could soon bring himself back to his old form. Teddy did so like, and
went back to Pemberton Heights with the thing secreted on his person. It
went with him to the bank next day—and every day.
For Teddy had begun to notice symptoms to which one less keenly
suspicious would be blind. Nothing was ever said of money missing, and
no hint thrown out that he himself was not trusted as before. He had
nothing to go on except that Mr. Brunt became more taciturn than ever,
and once or twice he thought he was being watched. The eyes of Jackman,
the principal house detective, wandered often toward him, and twice he,
Teddy, had seen Jackman in conference with Flynn.
"They’ll never get me alive," was his inner consolation, though
immediate suicide suggested itself as an alternative, and flight,
disappearance, an absolute blotting out was a third expedient.
Yet nothing was sure; nothing was even remotely sure. By becoming too
jumpy he might easily give himself away. Nicholson had had five years.
In two years, in one, Teddy meant to be square with the bank again.
But one afternoon, as he emerged into Broad Street on his way home,
Jackman and Flynn were talking together on the opposite pavement. The
boy jumped back, though not before he saw Jackman make a sign to Flynn
which said as plainly as words, "There he is now."
To Teddy, it was the end of the world. All the past, all the future,
merged into this single second of terror. He looked across at them; they
looked across at him. There was a degree of confession in the very way
in which his blanched face stared at them through the intervening
crowds.
Jackman’s lips formed half a dozen syllables, emphasized by a nod and a
lifting of the brows.
"That’s the guy all righty," were the words Teddy practically heard.
Like a startled wild thing, he had but one impulse—to run. Actual
running in Broad Street at that hour of the day being out of the
question, he dived into the procession mounting toward Wall Street,
ducking, dodging, pushing, almost knocking people down, and mad with
fear. "They’ll never get me alive," he was saying to himself; but how in
that crowd to find space in which to turn the pistol to his heart
already puzzled him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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