Meantime, Yorky had gone with his plunder no farther than a lighted stair at the foot of Broughton Street, which had stood conveniently open when he dashed round the corner of Barony Street. There he quickly wrenched off the lid, plunged his hand into the box to empty big handfuls of silver and gold into his pockets, and found instead only lead. The fact that he was alone draws a veil over the scene which followed. I have no doubt that his words flowed rapidly over his immediate disappointment, and his disgust may be inferred from the fact that he left the box and tokens entire in a corner of the stair. But a deeper rage was to come. Yorky remembered that the first information had come from The Gander, and the fact that we had been in waiting for him, and dummies or tokens substituted for the money the treasurer had been said to carry, seemed to the quick-witted Yorky to point to a plot to trap him. If he could bring that plot home to The Gander he resolved to put a knife in him. I have stated, however, that Nature had favoured The Gander with a look of dense stupidity, and, though Yorky took the first opportunity of seeking his society, and suspiciously sounding him on the subject, he made nothing of it. Bob Slogger he could not get at, for he was already in our hands for a separate offence. The suspicious manner and queer questions of Yorky alarmed The Gander quite as much as the failure of his plot disappointed him. “If I don’t have him laid by the heels soon he’ll shove a knife into me,” was his acute thought, which shows how sharp-witted folks can read each other through every fence of face and words. I took Yorky on the Monday, and we kept him for a day or two on suspicion, but, as the street had been dark and we had but a momentary glimpse of him, he had to be let off for want of evidence. Meantime, The Gander’s wits had been at work on a plot which, I must confess, was quite worthy of the object.