[CHAPTER XII.]
WHAT WAS SEEN BY THE CHURCH-YARD WALL.
The Sabbath has passed, and night has fallen upon the city once more.
The busy streets are growing deserted, and the great business thoroughfares about lower Broadway, silent at all hours on this the day of rest, have, as the night wears on, become almost entirely abandoned by pedestrians, and have sunk into obscurity and gloom.
As the midnight hour approached, the figure of a young man, roughly dressed in garments of the commonest sort, his face concealed beneath a low slouch hat, his mouth by a heavy black mustache, might have been observed to briskly ascend the Rector street hill, which rises along the church-yard wall, and to take his station at the corner of Broadway, close by the side of the iron fence which divides the old burial ground from the street.
He was evidently waiting for some one, for as he paced up and down beneath the cold light of the glittering stars his eye was from time to time turned upon the clock in the church tower, now about to strike the hour of twelve.
No one that had ever known Frank Mansfield would have recognized the neatly dressed young bank clerk in this rough looking youth who now strode uneasily up and down.
And yet it was none other than Frank himself, cleverly disguised, prompt on the hour of his appointment with Detective Hook.
Nor was that famous officer at all behindhand.
Just as the clock of old Trinity rang out the midnight hour the boy perceived him moving at a rapid pace down Broadway.