Reaching the opposite pavement, he had time to see that Jackman had crossed lower down and more easily than he, and was lumbering toward him from the downtown direction. Jackman could have shouted to the passers-by to lay hold of Teddy, only that, from a distance and among such numbers, he couldn’t indicate his victim. Being younger than Flynn and of lighter build, he could move in his own way almost with Teddy’s rapidity. The boy didn’t dare to run, because the action would have marked him out, but he started again on his snakelike gliding between pedestrians. He must gain some doorway, some cellar, some hole of any sort, in which to draw his pistol. He would have drawn it there and then, only that a hundred hands would have seized him. All at once he saw the open portal of a great mercantile building, leading to a vast interior with which he was familiar. There were several exits and many floors. Once he had turned in here, he could cross the scent. In he went, with scores who were doing likewise, passing scores who were coming out. His first intention was to avoid the conspicuous exit toward Dey Street and make for the less obvious one into Fulton Street; but in doing that, he passed a line of some twenty lifts, of which one was about to close its door. He slipped into it like a hare into its warren. The door clanged; the lift moved upward with an oily speed. Among his companions he was hot, flurried, breathless, and yet not more so than any other young clerk who had been doing an errand against time. There were nearly thirty floors, and he got off at the twenty-third. He chose the twenty-third so as not to get off too soon, and yet not call attention to himself by remaining in the lift when most of its occupants had left it. The floor was spacious and almost empty. A few people were waiting for a lift to take them down; a few were going in and out of offices, but otherwise he had the place to himself. Mechanically he walked to a window and looked out. He seemed to be up in the sky, with only the tops of a few giant cubes on a level with himself. "Skyscrapers" they were called, and skyscrapers they seemed up here even more than down below. The tip of the great city, the stretches of the bay, the green slopes of Staten Island, and the far-off colossal woman with a torch were all within his vision, with the oblique strip that was Broadway, a tiny, ugly gash in which bacteria were squirming, deep down and cutting across the foreground.