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.
At the corner of Wall Street he summoned courage to look over his shoulder. They might not be after him. If not, it would prove a false alarm, such as he had had before. But there they were—Jackman scrambling laboriously up the other side of Broad Street, and Flynn crossing it, picking his way among the vans and motor cars.
Like a frightened rabbit, Teddy scurried on again, meaning to gain Nassau Street and somehow double on his tracks.