As he approached the entrance of a certain prominent trust company he noticed a large envelope lying on the pavement.
Three or four persons passed it by, and one of them actually trod on it.
It looked as though it had been discarded by some one, and Jack, whose first idea had been to pick it up, felt ashamed to touch it lest some of the kids coming along should give him the laugh.
He was about to pass it when a D. T. messenger, rushing out of the trust company, gave it a kick, sending it flying against Jack’s feet, and then the boy concluded to examine it, for the way it had flown through the air showed it to be at least a bit weightier than an empty envelope.
And it was, for a fact.
As Jack hurried on, he counted six one-thousand-dollar, one five-hundred-dollar, and two one-hundred-dollar bank-notes. And that was all. No memorandum, and no name or address either inside or outside.
“Gee whiz!” he exclaimed. “Sixty seven hundred dollars, and no clue to the owner! And to think I’d have passed it by like a score of other people have done, if it hadn’t been for that little messenger kid kicking it almost into my hands. Who does it belong to? Some fellows might say—and Denny McFadden is one of that kind—that findings is keepings, but I’m not built that way. I’ll hand it over to Mr. Bishop, and perhaps he will hear of the party that lost it. At any rate, it doesn’t belong to me, and I have no right to keep it.”
Jack, who had been brought up to regard honesty as the best policy, stowed the envelope away in an inside pocket of his jacket, and then mounted the stairs leading to Oliver Bird’s office.
The boy was admitted to Mr. Bird’s inner sanctum, and the big broker no sooner recognized him than he jumped up from his desk, and, seizing him by both hands, shook them warmly.
“By George! I don’t know how to thank you for saving my life this morning,” he said, in a voice that quivered with emotion. “I certainly was not in my right senses at the time, and but for your quickness and nerve I would have been a corpse a moment later. Think what a shock you have saved my family! Young man, I shall be grateful to you all my life.”