The old gentleman had now reached them, red-faced and incoherent. He addressed himself to Mr. Cullen, and I no longer had any doubt whatever that the affair was a plant of the detective.
"I've been robbed of my pocketbook!" he exclaimed. "One of these two has got it—brushed up against me just now on the way out of the stalls. Where's the manager?"
Only a few people in the immediate vicinity were conscious that anything at all unusual was happening. The promenade just at that particular spot was almost deserted.
"This gentleman is certainly mistaken," Mr. Parker declared with dignity.
"Neither my friend nor myself knows anything about his pocketbook."
"I am sorry," Mr. Cullen said politely, "but I shall have to trouble you to come with me to Bow Street at once—and you, too, sir," he added, addressing the old gentleman. "I am a police officer and we will go into the matter there. You will agree with me that it is well not to make a disturbance here. I have two assistants with me."
He indicated by a little gesture two men who had emerged from somewhere in the background.
"I will go with the utmost pleasure," Mr. Parker consented. "At the same time this gentleman has obviously been drinking and his charge is absurd."
It was precisely at this moment that I felt something hard pressed against my hand. With a dexterity that was nothing short of miraculous, Mr. Parker, who apparently was standing with his hands in his pockets, had suddenly forced one of them through some secret opening in his coat.
In those few seconds it seemed to me I lived a year. I had no time to think—no time to realize that if I failed nothing could save my appearance at Bow Street on the following morning as a common pickpocket. I gripped the pocketbook from his hand and, without changing a muscle, dropped it into the yawning overcoat pocket of the bucolic gentleman.
The moment was over and passed. Mr. Parker, with a movement forward, had covered my proceedings. I had been face to face with death years before, but I had never felt quite the same thrill.