By this time Trotter could feel the sweat of embarrassment on his tingling body. He began to dramatize ridiculous contingencies. He pictured himself as haled into night court, as cross-examined by domineering and incredulous magistrates, who would send him to the Island as a suspicious person. He began to be haunted by the impression that he was being followed. The parcel became a weight to him, a disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim could not have been more ill at ease, more timorous, more terrified.
A sudden idea came to him as he passed a Chinese laundry in which lights still burned and irons still thumped on an ironing board. It was an audacious one, but it pointed toward deliverance.
His plan was to enter the laundry and pass over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again get sight of him!
But it took a moment or two to key himself up to the right pitch. He stepped in beside one of the granite column bases of the First National Trust, to give an extra tug to his still lagging courage. He leaned for a moment against the huge steel grillwork that covered the wide bank window behind him, looking eastward along the side street to where he could see the oblong of light from the laundry front.
A wave of exasperation swept through him at the thought of his own white-livered irresolution. He was about to step forward to face the end of his dilemma when an unlooked-for movement occurred between him and the illuminated laundry front.
It was the movement of a shadowy figure which seemed, at first sight, to erupt from the earth itself. It was several moments, in fact, before Trotter realized that the figure had come up from the basement of the building which stood immediately at the rear of the bank, the building which also contained the laundry. But this was not the thing that held Trotter's attention. The discovery which was causing his eyes to follow every step of the stranger was the fact that this second man ALSO CARRIED A LARGE PAPER PARCEL UNDER HIS ARM.
He turned eastward without looking back. Yet there was something circumspect in his footfall, something suspicious in the very casualness of his movements. Trotter leaned out and looked after him, nonplused by the coincidence, wondering if this second man's mission was the same as his own. He was almost glad to see somebody in the same boat.
Then curiosity overcame him. He turned and followed the other man. He walked eastward, keeping as well in to the house shadows as he could. He saw the man cross the wider traffic-way that ran north and south, look quickly up and down the deserted street and then, as he gained the shadow of the next house wall, veer close in to an iron paling. Then there was a movement which Trotter could not quite make out.
It was not until he crossed the street that he saw what the movement meant. It was not until he caught sight of a galvanized ash barrel standing beside the basement step and the stranger ahead of him walking empty-handed away, that Trotter realized the completeness of the coincidence.
The other man, without so much as stopping for a second, had quietly dropped his paper-wrapped parcel on the top of the galvanized barrel.