To the three policemen in uniform and the two officers who were not in uniform, in the center of the crowd, it never occurred that the throng of men who were crushing slowly but surely forward were acting in concert, and upon a perfectly defined schedule.
There was no noise—no violence—no disturbance of any sort—nothing, in fact, to give the officers in charge on the occasion the idea that a rescue was in progress.
Each one of those officers had had experience with rescues before that; each one of them would have known how to meet an emergency of that sort with a front that would have disabled its intentions then and there, had they or any one of them realized that an emergency existed.
And that was the point of the whole rescue.
That was the very thing which rendered it a success.
The very unostentatiousness of it! The utter and entire absence of noise or excitement! The steady and unrelenting pressure which the officers strove so quietly and so vainly to thrust back again! The quiet which the officers themselves maintained, fearing that any noise might reveal the identity of their prisoner!
Remember, it never once occurred to them that a rescue was in progress! Had one of them suspected that, revolvers would have been drawn, clubs would have been in evidence, an alarm would have been sounded and the attempt at rescue would have been defeated almost as soon as it began.
But there was nothing in the action of that crowd which so steadily pressed forward to indicate even that they knew who the prisoner was. There was nothing about the personnel of the crowd to suggest that it was not the ordinary miscellaneous collection of humanity which gathers at and departs from the Grand Central Station a hundred times every day of the year.
There was, in fact, nothing about the incident which was observable to the officers, which was at all out of the ordinary, save that the crowd was more dense than usual, and that the men who composed it seemed to be more than ordinarily determined to see for themselves what was going on.
Later, when explanations were demanded, there was really not one that was worthy of the name of explanation that could be offered.