This assurance did not have the desired effect. With many exhortations, slowly, painfully, they negotiated the distance to the Bennett headquarters in the old Almandares Block.
With a strong hand on his collar and the muzzle of a forty-four pressed between his shoulder blades, the unfortunate banker unlocked the door, threaded the long, crowded aisles in the pitch dark, and came at last to his private office. At his captor’s command he lighted a single gas jet near the safe; it made a wan and spectral light in the doleful place; in the corners of the great room the shadows crowded and trampled.
With his shriveled face contorted in dumb protest, with tears on his ash-pale cheeks, the wretched man groped at the combination. Strange thoughts must have passed through his mind as he knelt there, delaying desperately, hoping for the impossible.
Vainly, with a fiendish face, Beck urged and threatened; still the shaking fingers fumbled, without result. With a horrible snarl the gambler clasped Bennett’s wrist, twisted it up and back to the shoulder blades, and pushed it violently forward. Stifling a shriek, the tortured wretch pitched over on his face and lay there groveling, gasping, his free hand clawing at the boards of the floor.
The gambler raised him up, releasing the pressure on the twisted arm; Bennett twirled the knobs, the tumblers clicked, the bolts snicked from their sockets; the great door swung open.
“Now the little doors and the drawers!” Beck directed. He was sweating freely. For a moment it had seemed that Bennett would defy him at the last. “Don’t leave anything locked on me! Man, the sweat’s just pouring from you. That looks like a lot of money, to me. There, I forgot one thing! I saw one of those little electric flashlights in your show window yesterday. I want it. Lead me to it.”
After some delay in the dark the flashlight was found. By its aid the robber compelled his victim to search out and carry a neat traveling bag, certain coiled ropes, two silk handkerchiefs, and a round from a loose stool; and drove him back to the office.
Here, heedless of voiceless protest and despairing tears, he gagged the master of the counting house with the silk handkerchiefs and the chair round, and then, with scientific precision, proceeded to bind him hand and foot.
“There!” he said, after a final painstaking inspection. “That’ll hold you a while! It’s a pity you’re a bachelor. If you had a family they might find you here to-morrow. As it is I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till Monday morning. If you’ll excuse me I’ll turn out the gas now. Somebody might see it. I can do my packing by the searchlight.”
He sized up the stacks of gold, thumbed the bills, made a rough calculation, rolled on the prisoner an eye dark with suspicion, and remarked with great fervor, that he would be damned—Oh! Oh! He packed the money neatly in the bag. Then he turned the flashlight on Bennett’s livid face—a hopeless face, seared with greed and fear and all the unlovely passions.