The racket made by the monkey was nothing in comparison to the roar that broke from the lips of the now thoroughly awakened man, and had anyone witnessed the tremendous jump which Captain Quinn made he would have fancied the old tar suddenly cured of his rheumatism. The language which burst in a torrent from Quinn’s lips was of a decidedly sulphurous nature.
“You imp of the Old Nick!” he bellowed, making a dive and a grab for the elusive monkey. “I’ll wring your neck if I get my two hooks on it!”
Jocko, however, bounding over the furniture, skimming the length of a shelf, and seeming to swing himself along one of the bare walls of the room, perched on a window ledge beyond immediate reach. If possible, Captain Quinn was further aroused and enraged by barking his shins upon a chair.
“Furies!” he breathed. “Where’s my gun? I’ll blow a porthole in the hide of that infernal pest!”
As if realizing the peril to his very life, Jocko yanked away a mass of old rags which had completely filled the opening left by a broken windowpane, and darted through the aperture.
At about this moment Officer Sylvester, hastily approaching the front of the bank, fancied he saw a dark figure dart around a corner of the building and disappear. Shivering, more from excitement and exertion than from the cold, the night-watch pursued that shadowy figure, weapon in hand. At the back of the building he paused, hearing the voice of the old sailor raging within the nearby shanty.
“I s’pose it’s that old fool that’s made the disturbance,” muttered Jonas doubtfully. “Still, I kinder thought I saw something.”
Producing the electric torch he always carried while on duty, he flashed the light around him, making almost a complete arc of a circle. Suddenly the light stopped, bearing full upon an iron-barred window in the rear of the bank building, and there it hung quivering, revealing to Sylvester’s bulging eyes a most astounding and disturbing fact.
Three of the bars had been cut completely off and bent outward, and beyond them an entire section of the window glass was missing, leaving an opening large enough to admit the body of a man.
Almost paralyzed by this amazing discovery, Officer Sylvester felt his thick knees growing weak beneath him.