"If you don't put up that rod, I'll ditch it for you."
Archie obeyed Curly, but when he had restored the revolver to his pocket, he continued to talk of it, and then of other weapons he had owned, and he told Curly how he had won the sharp-shooter's medal in the army.
But finally, in his weariness, Archie lost interest even in his new revolver, and when Curly would not let him go to the door of the car and look out, lest the trainmen should see them and force them into an encounter, Archie had fallen asleep in a corner.
It was a relief to Curly when Archie went to sleep, for in addition to his joy in his revolver, Archie had been excited over their adventure. Curly was in many ways peculiar; he was inclined to be secretive; he frequently worked alone, and his operations were as much a mystery to his companions and to Gibbs as they were to the police. He had had his eye on the little post-office at Trenton for months; it had called to him, as it were, to come and rob it. It had advantages, the building was old; an entrance could be effected easily. He had stationed Archie outside to watch while he knocked off the peter, and Archie had acquitted himself to Curly's satisfaction. The affair came off smoothly. Though it was in the short summer night, no one had been abroad; they got away without molestation. Now, as they drew near the city, Curly felt easy.
Late in the afternoon Curly saw signs of the city's outposts--the side-tracks were multiplying in long lines of freight-cars. Then Curly wakened Archie, and when the train slowed up, they dropped from the car.
It was good to feel once more their feet on the ground, to walk and stretch their tired, numb muscles, good to breathe the open air and, more than all, good to see the city looming under its pall of smoke. They joined the throngs of working-men; and they might have passed for working-men themselves, for Curly wore overalls, as he always did on his expeditions, and they were both so black from the smoke and cinders of their journey, that one might easily have mistaken their grime for that of honest toil.
They came to the river, pressed up the long approach to its noble bridge, and submerged themselves in the stream of life that flowed across it, the stream that was made up of all sorts of people--working-men, clerks, artisans, shop-girls, children, men and women, the old and the young, each individual with his burden or his care or his secret guilt, his happiness, his hope, his comedy or his tragedy, losing himself in the mass, merging his identity in the crowd, doing his part to make the great epic of life that flowed across the bridge as the great river flowed under it--the stream in which no one could tell the good from the bad, or even wish thus to separate them, in which no one could tell Archie or Curly from the teacher of a class in a Sunday-school. Here on the bridge man's little distinctions were lost and people were people merely, bound together by the common possession of good and bad intentions, of good and bad deeds, of frailties, errors, sorrows, sufferings and mistakes, of fears and doubts, of despairs, of hopes and triumphs and heroisms and victories and boundless dreams.
Beside them rumbled a long procession of trucks and wagons and carriages, street-cars moved in yellow procession, ringing their cautionary gongs; the draw in the middle of the bridge vibrated under the tread of all those marching feet; its three red lights were already burning overhead. Far below, the river, growing dark, rolled out to the lake; close to its edge on the farther shore could be descried, after long searching of the eye, the puffs of white smoke from crawling trains; vessels could be picked out, tugs and smaller craft, great propellers that bore coal and ore and lumber up and down the lakes; here and there a white passenger-steamer, but all diminutive in the long perspective. Above them the freight-depots squatted; above these elevators lifted themselves, and then, as if on top of them, the great buildings of the city heaved themselves as by some titanic convulsive effort in a lofty pile, surmounted by the high office buildings in the center, with here and there towers and spires striking upward from the jagged sky-line. All this pile was in a neutral shade of gray,--lines, details, distinctions, all were lost; these huge monuments of man's vanity, or greed, or ambition, these expressions of his notions of utility or of beauty, were heaped against a smoky sky, from which the light was beginning to fade. Somewhere, hidden far down in this mammoth pile, among all the myriads of people that swarmed and lost themselves below it, were Gusta and Dick Ward, old man Koerner and Marriott, Modderwell and Danner, Bostwick and Parrish, and Danny Gibbs, and Mason, and Eades, but they were lost in the mass of human beings--the preachers and thieves, the doctors and judges, and aldermen, and merchants, and working-men, and social leaders, and prostitutes--who went to make up the swarm of people that crawled under and through this pile of iron and stone, thinking somehow that the distinctions and the grades they had fashioned in their little minds made them something more or something less than what they really were.
II
And yet, after having crossed the bridge in the silence that was the mysterious effect of the descent of evening over the city, after having been gathered back again for a few moments into human relations with their fellow mortals, Archie and Curly became thieves again. This change in them occurred when they saw two policemen standing at the corner of High Street, where the crowd from the bridge, having climbed the slope of River Street, began to flow in diverging lines this way and that. The change was the more marked in Archie, for at sight of the policemen he stopped suddenly.