CHAPTER IV.
THE BANK PRESIDENT.
Sprague's dinner party was over, and among the first to take their leave, shortly after midnight, were Dunlap, Sturgis and Doctor Thurston.
The reporter did not often spend an evening in worldly dissipation. He was a man of action, a hard worker and an enthusiastic student. Almost all of the time which was not actually spent in the pursuit of his profession, was devoted to study in many widely different fields of art and science. For Sturgis's ideal of his profession was high; he held that almost every form of knowledge was essential to success in his line of work. It was seldom, therefore, that he allowed himself to spend a precious evening in social intercourse, unless as a more or less direct means to some end. He had made an exception in favor of Sprague's dinner, and his meeting with Dunlap, whom he had not previously known, had been entirely accidental.
Dunlap was, however, a man whom Sturgis needed to see in the course of his study of the Knickerbocker bank mystery, and he had not lost the opportunity which chance had placed in his way. After obtaining an introduction to the bank president, the reporter had sought an occasion to speak with him in private; and, as this did not present itself during the course of the evening, he had timed his departure so that it should coincide with that of Dunlap. Doctor Thurston had followed his friend's lead.
"Are you going down to the bank this evening, Mr. Dunlap?" asked Sturgis, as the trio faced the bleak wind.
"I? No. Why should I?" inquired the banker in apparent surprise.
"I see no particular reason why you should," replied the reporter. "If to-day were a banking day, there would be no time to lose. But since it is New Year's day, there is little, if any, chance of the trail being disturbed; and it will be much easier to find it in broad daylight than by gaslight. Our friends of the Central Office are usually pretty clever in discovering at least the more evident clues in a case of this sort, even when they have not the ability to correctly interpret them. And since they have completely failed in their search to-night, we must anticipate a more than ordinarily difficult puzzle."
"Why, Mr. Sturgis," said Dunlap somewhat anxiously. "You talk as though you really believed that some mysterious crime has been committed at the bank."
"I do not know enough about the case as yet to advance any positive belief in the matter," said Sturgis; "but if we assume as correct the circumstances related in the article which Doctor Murdock read to us this evening, they certainly present an extraordinary aspect."