"THERE MUST BE SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH MY NERVES"
"There must be something the matter with my nerves this morning," he said, scratching his head in bewilderment. "I was sure somebody spoke to me."
Jack had all he could do to keep from laughing outright, but safety bade him restrain the impulse, and in a moment he had climbed over the steel grillwork and entered the sacred precincts of Ready Money. Once within the teller's cage his heart began to thump so violently that it seemed impossible for him to escape detection, but so busy were all the bank people with the duties of the day that no one seemed to hear. And then our hero began. Within five minutes he had stowed away within the capacious pockets of his invisible cloak as many of the packages of bills, green-backed and yellow, as he could possibly carry there, and then, slipping out through the little door at the rear of the cage, he walked calmly out of the bank with them. Arrived on Broadway, he removed his coat and, hanging it over his arm, took a taxicab back to the Redmere.
He could hardly wait until he reached his apartment to count up the results of his morning's work, but his caution stood by him, and it was not until he had locked his door and barricaded it with the bureau rolled in front of it that he opened the various packages. There were ten of them altogether, and Jack's eyes nearly popped out of his head with wonder as he saw so much real money spread out before him. Three of the packages held one thousand dollars each in twenty-dollar bills, four of them held five hundred dollars each in five-dollar bills, and the other three totalled fifteen hundred dollars in ones and twos—sixty-five hundred dollars altogether.
"Mike!" he cried, going to the dumbwaiter shaft, and calling down, vociferously, "turn on the heat, and tell the boss to send a truck around here for his rent."
Hiding the money under the mattress of his bed, Jack removed the invisible cloak and hung it in the closet, taking care to lock the door thereof, and then he started to shave. His hand trembled too much for this, however, and after he had snipped off two or three pieces of his cheek he abandoned the effort, but his brief trial before the glass had a distinct moral influence upon him, for as his eye caught its own reflection in the mirror, and Jack came to look himself squarely in the face for the first time since his removal of the money from the bank, he found that he could not do it. His eye faltered and fell, and the question flashed across his mind as to the honesty of his morning's work.
"Hum!" he muttered, sitting down suddenly on his bed and staring at a hole in the carpet, "I hadn't thought of that before! What would my poor but honest parents think about this?"
He scratched the end of his nose thoughtfully.
"It isn't any too straight, even in these days of frenzied finance," he went on; "that is, it isn't unless I regard this thing as a loan! Of course if it's a loan—yes, it must be. Otherwise I'm no better than any other—"
His brow cleared as the idea entered his mind.