Sharp as was the watch which Bar was keeping, he very nearly missed seeing the deft and dexterous passage from hand to hand of a wallet which seemed the very counterpart and image of the one in his own pocket, but it disappeared in the capacious outer garment of a tall, thin, foreign-looking gentleman at his side.
The thought flashed through Bar’s brain with a rapidity compared to which lightning is a stage-coach, and his fingers moved with only less quickness and with marvelous skill.
“The weight must be about the same,” thought Bar, “and he’ll never know the difference. It’s splendid fun to have got in on old Prosper himself. The Major must be inside there somewhere. No, there go both of them, making off as fast as they can.”
Just then a clear and somewhat scornful voice arose above the rest, exclaiming:
“Get up, you wretched fraud. There’s nothing at all the matter with you. Don’t give him a cent, gentlemen, if that’s what he’s after. He’s no more in a fit than you and I are.”
“Hurrah for the doctor!” shouted a somewhat youthful bystander, but the physician, a tall, fine-looking, benevolent-faced gentleman, forced his way to the edge of the sidewalk, sprang into a carriage which seemed to be waiting for him, and drove away, with the disgusted air of a professional man whose sympathies had been imposed upon.
He had not been deceived, however, except for the first few moments, by even the admirable acting of the halfway genteel scamp, who now picked himself up so sheepishly and sneaked around the corner amid the jeers of the wayfarers, just in time to evade the fingers of the police.
“It was a regular put-up job,” exclaimed Bar, as he walked away. “Anyhow, it won’t be difficult for me to find out who this thing belongs to. Maybe it’s the doctor himself, only I can’t see how he should have such a thing about him and push right into a crowd with it.”
Bar had not seen the doctor’s carriage pull up as it did, with the first intimation that a human being might be in need of his skill, nor could he know how completely such an affair, in the first place, and his chagrin at being “sold,” in the second, had driven out of the worthy doctor’s mind for the moment all other considerations.
For all that, however, Dr. Manning’s carriage was in front of police headquarters in less than an hour from that time.