The Hawk relapsed into silence for a moment; then he spoke again.
“Yes,” said the Hawk, “I guess that ought to work. She won't make the three miles from the siding under five or six minutes. She's due at Burke's at ten-ten. I can make it on the local out of here at eight-thirty. Twenty thousand dollars—in unset stones! Just as good as cash—and a lot easier to carry!”
The Hawk looked at his watch. It was five minutes of eight. He rose leisurely from his chair, stooped for a precautionary inspection of the trunk lock, put on his coat, and, moving toward the door, switched off the light.
“If I get away with this,” observed the Hawk, as he went down the stairs and let himself out through the street door, “it'll be good-night for keeps if any of the gang ever pick up my trail—and they won't quit until they do! And then there's MacVightie and the police. I guess there'll be some little side-stepping to do—what? Oh, well”—he shrugged his shoulders—“I guess I'll get a bite of supper, anyway—there's no telling when I'll have a chance to eat again!”
VIII—THREADS IN THE WEB
IT was not far to the station—down through the lane from the Palace Saloon—and close to the station, he remembered, there was a little short-order house that was generally patronised by the railroad men. Old Mother Barrett's short-order house, they called it. She was the wife of an engineer who had been killed, he had heard, and she had a boy working somewhere on the railroad. Not that he was interested in these details; in fact, as he walked along, the Hawk was not interested in old Mother Barrett in a personal sense at all—but, as he reached the short-order house and entered, his eyes, as though magnetically drawn in that direction, fixed instantly on the little old woman behind the counter.
The Hawk was suddenly very much interested in old Mother Barrett. It was not that she made a somewhat pathetic figure, that she drooped a little at the shoulders, that her face under her grey hair looked tired, or that, though scrupulously neat, her clothes were a little threadbare—it was none of these things—it was old Mother Barrett's hands that for the moment concerned the Hawk. She was in the act of adjusting her spectacles and picking up a very new and crisp ten-dollar bill, that a customer from the stool in front of her had evidently tendered in payment for his meal. The Hawk shot a quick glance up and down the room. There were several other customers at the long counter, but the stool beside the owner of the ten-dollar bill was vacant—and the Hawk unostentatiously straddled it.
He glanced casually at the man at his elbow; allowed his eyes to stray to the kindly, motherly old face with its grey Irish eyes, that was puckered now in a sort of hesitant indecision—and glanced a little more than casually at the banknote she kept turning over and over in her hands. No, he had not been mistaken. It was one of those counterfeits which, according to MacVightie, had flooded the East and were now making their appearance in Selkirk, and it was a duplicate of those in the false tray of his trunk. His eyes perhaps were sharper than old Mother Barrett's—in any case, his identification was the quicker, for his gaze had wandered to the coffee urn, and he was drumming idly on the counter with his finger tips before the little old woman finally spoke.