At that moment the newsboy crept out from under the shadows of the Custom House fence and followed them, dodging from one side of the street to the other, calling his papers, and occasionally stopping to sell one, but always keeping the forms of Messrs. Cutts and Callister plainly in view.
"I've got yer now, yer sly old rat!" he muttered, as he crossed Wall street close at their heels. "An', by gracious, I orter after all the time I spent a-watchin'. I seen them papers wat's got the picter of the Lispenard bank onter them. If she an' me don't spoil yer little game this time 'twon't be no faalt of Jerry Buck's, an' don't yer forget it!"
Who "she was" did not appear as yet.
Certainly, in his present position, Master Jerry Buck was playing the part of a detective quite alone.
Down William street to Liberty, down Liberty to its junction with Malden Lane, down Malden Lane to Pearl street the men advanced, all unconscious of the ragged youth who followed close at their heels.
Turning to the left, they kept along Pearl street, beneath the shadows of the great structure of the elevated railroad, nor did they make another turn until Franklin Square was reached.
And when they passed beneath the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge and entered Cherry street, smelling of a thousand and one ill odors, suggestive of anything save the luscious fruit from which its name is derived, Jerry Buck was still behind them.
He had ceased to call his papers now, but stood silently watching them from between two empty trucks drawn up by the side of the curbstone, as they entered the very house on the easterly side of Cherry street, just beyond Catherine, which he had pointed out to Frank Mansfield upon the occasion of their Sunday morning visit to the Catherine Market as the one into which the burglars of the Webster Bank had disappeared.
No sooner had the two men passed through the doorway than the newsboy, pulling his tattered felt hat low down over his eyes, quietly crossed the street, entered the house himself, and crept silently after them up the rickety stairs, just in time to see Detective Cutts, the man paid by the City for the detection of crime, and Mr. Elijah Callister, the pious brother of the Tenth Baptist Church, disappear within the rear room on the second landing of the tenement, the door of which was immediately closed.
Then Jerry Buck, giving utterance to a peculiar chuckle, slipped past the door, mounted still another pair of stairs and tapped lightly upon the panels of the door of the room immediately above.