As before, this parcel was carried for three blocks and then adroitly deposited on the top of an ash barrel.
Trotter, once Heeney had skulked about the next corner, quietly crossed the street and sauntered past the parcel-crowned barrel, with his open pocketknife in his hand. One sweep of the knife blade slit the paper wrapper, and without so much as stopping on his way Trotter was able to catch up a handful of the litter it held. This litter, as before, was made up of ground mortar and plaster and stone chips. But this time, amid the lime and dust, he could detect the glitter of minute particles of steel.
He tested the larger fragments of these with his knife point. They were very hard, harder even than his tempered blade steel, diamond-like in their durity. He concluded, as he sat on the edge of his bed that night, rubbing them between his fingers, that they could be nothing but particles of keenly-tempered chromium steel. And chromium steel, he knew, was not used in gas pipes. It was foolish to think of it as a subject for lathe work. It was equally absurd to accept it as an everyday element in any plumber's everyday work. Trotter was not ignorant of the fact that steel of this character was used almost exclusively in the construction of high grade safes and bank vaults.
He stood up, suddenly, and crossed the room to his little bookshelf. From this shelf he took down a much-thumbed "World Almanac," a paper-bound volume which for months past had been serving as his only guide to New York. He turned to the pages headed "Banks in Manhattan and Bronx." It took but a minute's search to secure the names of the president and cashier of the First National Trust Company. But when he further read that its capital was three million five hundred thousand, and that its total resources amounted to forty-seven million three hundred thousand dollars, his breath came in shorter gasps of excitement. He began to realize the colossal wealth which lay guarded behind the great porphyritic granite pillars. He also began to realize some new and as yet undefined responsibility. The mere thought of the magnitude of the movement in which he was being made a deliberate and yet disinterested factor brought him once more to his feet, pacing his little den of a room with thoughtful and preoccupied steps.
V
Early the next morning Trotter was back at the bank corner, like a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the cellar, with a tool kit under his arm.
Five minutes later Trotter was descending the stairs that led to the plumber's shop. Once there, he took out his key, fitted it to the lock, opened the door, stepped quietly inside, and locked the outer door after him. Before venturing to open the inner door he pressed an ear flat against the wooden partition and stood there listening. The silence was unbroken.
He stepped to the side of the shop and caught up a plumber's thick-bodied tallow candle. Then he softly opened the second door, stepped inside, and as softly closed the door after him.
He found himself in perfect darkness. But he stood there, waiting, before venturing to move forward, before daring to strike a light. He knew, as he peered about the blackness that engulfed him, that he was now facing more than an indeterminate responsibility. He was confronting actual and immediate danger. Even as he stood there, sniffing at the air, so heavy with its smell of damp lime and its undecipherable underground gases, a sudden fuller consciousness of undefined and yet colossal peril sent a telegraphing tingle of nerves up and down his body.
The only thing that broke the silence was the faint sound of footsteps on the laundry floor above him, together with the steady thump of irons on the ironing table. There was something fortifying, something consoling, in those neighborly and sedentary little noises.