“Say, boss, have they bin an’ collared the big safe? Do you want assistance?”
The Manager turned to take refuge in the Bank, but his tormentors were relentless.
“Hold on, mate—you’re in trouble. Confide in us. If the books won’t balance, what matter? Don’t let that disturb your peace of mind. Come and have a drink.... Take a hand at poker.... First tent over the bridge, right-hand side.”
“It’s no go, boys. He’s narked because he knows we want an overdraft. Let ’im go and count his cash.”
The Manager pulled himself free from the roisterers and escaped into the Bank by the side door, and the diggers continued noisily on their way.
The lights of the Bank suddenly went out, and the Manager, after carefully locking the door behind him, crossed over the street to the livery stables, where a light burned during the greater part of the night. In a little box of a room, where harness hung on all the walls, there reclined on a bare and dusty couch a red-faced man, whose hair looked as if it had been closely cropped with a pair of horse-clippers. When he caught sight of the banker, he sat up and exclaimed, “Good God, Mr. Tomkinson! Ain’t you in bed?”
“It’s this gold-escort, Manning—it was due at six o’clock.”
“Look here.” The stable-keeper rose from his seat, placed his hand lovingly on a trace which hung limply on the wall. “Don’t I run the coach to Beaver Town?—and I guess a coach is a more ticklish thing to run than a gold-escort. Lord bless your soul, isn’t every coach supposed to arrive before dark? But they don’t. ‘The road was slippy with frost—I had to come along easy,’ the driver’ll say. Or it’ll be, ‘I got stuck up by a fresh in the Brown River.’ That’s it. I know. But they always arrive, sometime or other. I’ll bet you a fiver—one of your own, if you like—that the rivers are in flood, and your people can’t get across. Same with the Beaver Town coach. She was due at six o’clock, and here’ve I been drowsing like a more-pork on this couch, when I might have been in bed. An’ to bed I go. If she comes in to-night, the driver can darn well stable the ’orses himself. Good night.”
This was a view of the question that had not occurred to Mr. Tomkinson, but he felt he must confer with the Sergeant of Police.
The lock-up was situated in a by-street not far from the centre of the town. The Sergeant was sitting at a desk, and reading the entries in a big book. His peaked shako lay in front of him, and he smoked a cigar as he pored over his book.