Cap'n Sproul, prudently on the outskirts of the gathering crowd, noted with rising hope that the policeman and the Colonel were rolling over each other on the ground, and that even when officious hands had separated them the facial contortions of the voiceless tyrant of Smyrna were not making any favorable impression on the offended bluecoat.
Cap'n Sproul started away for the bank at a trot. But he began to walk when he heard the policeman shout: "Aw, there's enough of ye'r moonkey faces at me. Yez will coome along to th' station, and talk it on yer fingers to th' marshal!"
At the bank door the Cap'n halted, wiped his face, composed his features, set on his cap at an entirely self-possessed angle, and then marched in to the wicket.
"Will you have this transferred to your account, Captain Sproul?" inquired the teller, with the deference due to a good customer.
The Cap'n anxiously bent a stubbed finger around a bar of the grating. Sudden anxiety as to leaving the money there beset him. After his perils and his toils he wanted to feel that cash—to realize that he had actually cashed in that hateful check.
"I'll take the real plasters," he said, huskily; "big ones as you've got. I—I want to pay for some vessel property!" He reflected that the few hundreds that the loss of the ancient Dobson called for lifted this statement out of the cheap level of prevarication.
When he hurried out of the bank with various thick packets stowed about his person, he headed a straight course for the police-station.
In the marshal's office he found Colonel Gideon Ward, voiceless, frantic, trembling—licking at the point of a stubby lead-pencil that had been shoved into his grasp, and trying to compose his soul sufficiently to write out some of the information about himself, with which he was bursting.
"There ain't no call for this man to write out the story of his life," declared Cap'n Sproul, with an authority in his tones and positiveness in his manner that did not fail to impress the marshal. "He is my brother-in-law, he is Colonel Gideon Ward, of Smyrna, a man with more'n a hundred thousand dollars, and any one that accuses him of bein' a thief is a liar, and I stand here to prove it."
And to think there was no one present except the Colonel to appreciate the cryptic humor of that remark!