"See that guy over there?" Lobley, one of his colleagues, had asked him.
He saw the guy over there—a crafty, clean-shaven Celt—and said so.
"That's Flynn, the detective who copped Nicholson, the teller at the Wyndham National."
"O my God! I'm pinched!" Teddy exclaimed to himself. "If I had a gun or a dose of poison, he'd never get me alive."
But Flynn only chatted with Jackman, one of the house detectives, laughed, cashed a check at a wicket, and left the bank.
Teddy breathed again, wondering if he had given anything away to Lobley. Was it possible that Lobley could have heard of the twenty dollars and been set to try him out? No; he didn't believe so. Lobley had merely pointed out Flynn as a notable character, and gone about his business.
"I shall never forget that mug," Teddy thought, as he summoned his sang-froid to go on with his work. "The mug of a guy without guts," he added, further to define the pitiless set of Flynn's features. "I sure would kill myself before I let him touch me."
There was no other alarm that day; there was only the incessant fear, the incessant watchfulness that made him shrink from every eye that glanced his way, and which, when office hours were over, sent him scuttling to the subway like a rabbit to its hole.
At supper, his father brought up again the subject of the taxes and the interest on the mortgage. The latter would be due at the end of the following week, and the former was long overdue. With the added interest on both, he owed two hundred and sixty-odd dollars, of which he had borrowed from old friends a hundred and fifteen. Between the sum due and that in hand, there was a gap which he didn't see how to fill.
"We'll get it somehow, daddy," Jennie said, encouragingly. "Don't begin worrying."