The man in the brown coat knelt beside him and went through his pockets swiftly, carefully. In the inside pocket of his suitcoat he found a thick packet of currency, slipped it into his own inside pocket.
A new sound, the faint stutter of an incoming train on the adjoining track, grew above the roar of the wind. The man glanced ahead, around the corner of the car, seemed for a moment to be calculating the distance away of the approaching headlight, then stooped again, swiftly.
Hurriedly he stripped off the man’s overcoat, then his own. He struggled into the former — a rather tight-fitting tweed Chesterfield — and somehow forced the other man’s arms and shoulders into his own big dark-brown camel’s hair; then he finished transferring the contents of his own inside pockets — several letters, a monogrammed cigarette case and other odds and ends — to the inside pockets of the unconscious man.
The stutter of the approaching train grew to a hoarse scream. He boosted the limp body onto his shoulder, stood up, and when the blinding headlight of the train on the adjoining track was about twenty-five or thirty feet away, he dumped his burden over the side-rail of the observation platform down onto the track in front of the onrushing locomotive.
Then he turned swiftly and went back through the observation car. As he reached the third car forward the train slowed and he heard a far-off voice shout:
“Hundred an’ Twenty-fifth Street.”
When the train stopped and a porter opened the doors of the vestibule between the third and fourth car, the man, now in a tight-fitting tweed Chesterfield, swung off and sauntered down the stairs that led from the station to the street.
As he crossed the street towards a cab he heard the conductor’s thin far off wail above the wind: “All aboard...”
He climbed into the cab, snapped: “Three thirty-two West Ninetieth — and make it fast.”
Green lit a match and examined the mailboxes carefully. The second one on the left rewarded him with a dingy label upon which: